Hawaii boulder footage captures woman nearly crushed inside home
A massive boulder crashed into a home in Hawaii over the weekend, narrowly missing a woman inside, dramatic footage shows.
the video recordings the unsuspecting woman walking down a hallway in her hillside home in Honolulu when the boulder smashes through a wall just feet away from her, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake.
Officials said the boulder, which is 5 feet (1.5 m) tall and wide, breached the concrete block wall, living room and then another wall of the home before settling in a bedroom around midnight Saturday, Hawaii News Now reported.
A car was also damaged, but no one in the home was injured, the news outlet reported.
The woman who was nearly hit by the boulder, Caroline Sasaki, was shaken.
“All I heard was the bang as the glass cracked off the sliding door, so I backed up and I think it went right through me,” the 65-year-old said, according to KITV 4.
The family had only been in the newly built home for about a week when the destructive boulder fell, the station reported.
“I didn’t watch the video but they said if I went one step further I probably wouldn’t be here,” Sasaki reportedly said, since noticing a bad leg means she walks slower.
Sasaki and other homeowners in the neighborhood believe excavation work near a proposed development is the cause of the rockfall, KHON 2 reported.
“We used to live in this place. We simply tore down the old house and rebuilt it; and it has never happened, heavy rain and hurricane warnings nothing. So no rocks ever came down,” Sasaki told the broadcaster. “We had some issues with them carving the mountain and I don’t know if that’s the cause.”
Development owner Bingning Li insisted his project was not to blame.
“Not at all, that’s from way up, I was looking at one of these rocks about 50 feet from the top of the property and landed over there and then came down here,” Li reportedly said.
“So it hit one of the cables it was supposed to stop and the cable snapped. That took a lot of energy, otherwise this damage would have been much greater.”
