Hype about king tides sounded all too familiar

‘Heard about all the flooding in Hawaii. Hope you’re OK.”

Got that message from a friend in L.A. Maybe you had friends on the mainland worried about you, too.

Last week Hawaii braced for an ominous weather phenomenon most had never heard of: king tides.

The scary situation was created by a confluence of elements: the highest high tides predicted for the year, a south swell expected to bring large surf, and news media in an early summer, post-Legislature slump with a dearth of other subjects to cover and a penchant for the theatricality of a weather event.

By Friday’s evening newscasts, if you didn’t have a sense of proportion, you’d think everyone needed to run for the hills. There were live shots that went on for so long it was as though they were waiting for an alien spaceship to land. They were actually waiting for a wave to wash over a concrete wall. One finally did but it wasn’t much.

That’s not to say it was nothing. The National Weather Service and a group of university scientists were keen on observing the conditions. The city set out hundreds of sandbags at Ala Moana Beach Park and Kuhio Beach at Waikiki to guard against a surge of water. Hotels and structures along the shoreline braced for a surge. And as always happens when the tides are high, the streets of Mapunapuna were underwater.

There’s the responsibility of helping the public be watchful and ready, and then there’s the irresponsibility of hoping that something exciting actually happens. Between those two positions is a line of propriety, of civility, of good taste. It’s not right to wish for damage, even if the wish is not malevolent, but just the desire for a good story.

The news coverage was salted with quotes that registered the search for any sign of havoc:

“The water moved past the walls in some areas and splashed onto the sidewalk, making it somewhat difficult for runners.”

“I had one bloody nose today, that was about it.”

“The big swell came and together we fall. Then we lost bag and in the bag is my iPhone.”

Thank goodness it was anticlimactic.

There will be king tides the next two months. (There are king tides every year, BTW. It’s just a term for the biggest tides of the year.) Hopefully, what we get is no more than what we got: water on coastal roadways and some wet floors in ground-level restaurants and parking lots. A clear, predictable danger, though, is getting people so used to urgent messages of severe weather conditions that never materialize that they stop believing — like the townsfolk sick of the histrionic boy who cried wolf — when something dire is actually heading our way.

This is not fake news. It’s real enough. But if everything is treated like a huge emergency, it’s harder to get the public’s attention when people really do need to run for the hills.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.