Tornado, Hawaii style, gives viewers a rush of adrenaline

Giovanni Nicosia has a history of joking with his girlfriend about seeing a "tornado cloud," but the matter was no joke Thursday.

"When I got on Ka Uka (Boulevard), I said, ‘Look, it’s a tornado,’" the 31-year-old Mili­lani resident said he told his girlfriend. "I was thinking it’s a funnel cloud, but I saw all the dirt twisting in the air with it. It was really neat. I was wishing it would get closer."

Air traffic controllers at Kalaeloa Airport reported to the National Weather Service they spotted a tornado at 2:56 p.m. Thursday 1 mile east-northeast of Kalaeloa in Kapo­lei.

"The weather here is different from the Midwest, but we do get tornadoes," said weather service forecaster Pete Donaldson. "It’s probably not all that unusual," but "more of them are over water because there’s more water than land, and because it’s mountainous here, people aren’t going to see every funnel cloud that develops."

Judging from videos and photos, meteorologists determined that Thursday’s spinner was, by definition, a tornado since it was a funnel cloud over land that touched ground.

Funnel clouds can cause problems, but the ones seen in Hawaii "aren’t very strong, like the ones leveling towns on the mainland," Donaldson said.

No damage or injuries were reported after Thursday’s event.

But on Feb. 12, 2009, a tornado at the Kapo­lei Golf Course lifted and hurled an employee into a window, and picked up a golf cart and threw it 60 feet into a tractor.

On Thursday afternoon Courtney Walker, 25, was driving home from work on the North-South Road coming out of Kapo­lei heading home to Wai­pio. "It caught my eye," she said. "I said, ‘Oh my goodness. That’s not just a funnel cloud, that’s a full-on thing. … It’s turning and it’s hitting ground.’"

"It was the perfect view of it," Walker said. "It looked like farmland on Kunia roads. It was just a bunch of dust going all the way up. It’s lifting up dust."

Walker said, "I was just amazed." She recorded the phenomenon with a cellphone while driving because she wanted to show her mother. Her mother later scolded her because it’s illegal to drive and take a video.

Weather service forecaster Tony Reynes said, "Tornadoes are usually associated with big, strong thunderstorms, which was not the case (Thursday)."

He said it basically was a waterspout over land. Hawaii’s tornadoes are produced by "the same mechanism that produces waterspouts," he said.