By James Gonser and Dan Nakaso, The Honolulu Advertiser
HONOLULU — Heavy rain sent water as much as 8 feet deep rushing through the University of Hawaii's main research library Saturday, destroying irreplaceable documents and books, toppling doors and walls and forcing a few students to break a window to escape.
Professor Terrence Lyttle's biomedical lab was at one point under 4 1/2 feet of water.
Flood water also washed through a biomedical lab, destroying at least a third of a professor's collection of flies used for genetic research.
Ten inches of rain fell in 24 hours starting Saturday morning in the Manoa Valley near Waikiki. Several cars were carried downstream when Manoa Stream overflowed its banks, and a school and church that were supposed to serve as polling places for Tuesday's election also were damaged.
Gov. Linda Lingle toured the university Sunday and declared Manoa Valley a state disaster area.
Manoa residents shoveled mud and debris out of their homes Sunday, while University of Hawaii officials canceled Monday classes and estimated damage in the millions after daybreak revealed the full extent of damage caused by the Halloween Eve flood.
The UH-Manoa campus was hit hard after the flash flood topped the banks of Manoa Stream and created a new river that raced through the heart of campus. Hamilton Library and the Biomedical Sciences building sustained the most serious damage, officials said.
About three dozen campus buildings did not have electricity yesterday, and workers scrambled to rig generators and dry-ice coolers so experiments would not be lost.
Professor Terrence Lyttle's biomedical lab was under 4 feet of water, destroying at least one-third of the 50,000 Drosophila, which are similar to fruit flies, that were stored in his ground-floor incubator.
Lyttle's genetic research on the Drosophila goes back 35 years and some of it is irretrievably lost, he said.
"I've been studying that system for my entire career, since I was a graduate student," said Lyttle, 56.
The water also ruined $100,000 worth of computers, microscopes and other electronic equipment
In the Hamilton Library basement, students in a class had to smash a window to escape rising floodwaters, said Sara McBride, library development and community specialist.
On Sunday, the water mark in the basement was 6 feet high, and mud filled drawers full of archival maps and documents.
McBride and much of the library staff worked all day Sunday to try to save some of the 90,000 photographs stored in the basement along with rare government documents and Hawaiian maps.
The flood also destroyed computers, books, magazines and equipment.