Rowboats down the Street

Honolulu’s wet and dark today, with passing downpours sending small rivers of water into the storm drains downtown. The gloom is at least interspersed with patches of blue sky, but it looks like November is marking the beginning of the rainy season. I’m hoping this year’s is a temperate one. 2006’s miserable 40 days of rain are still fresh in mind, and that biblical episode was far from the first catastrophic rainy season that Hawaii has endured.

Take the spring of 1951, for example, when Kailua town flooded to the point that residents had to paddle to get anywhere. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that again.

All photos courtesy of the Hawaii State Archives.