WASHINGTON — A Hawaii homeowner is lucky to be alive after a massive boulder crashed into her family's home, less than a month after they moved in.
Dramatic video from inside the home shows the path the boulder took as it barreled through the family's living room in Honolulu late Saturday night, narrowly missing the woman.
In the video, family members can be seen checking on each other next to the splintered wood and bits of wall that landed in the living room.
According to KHON2, a Hawaii TV station, the boulder was about five feet high, and equally as wide.
The TV station reported that the giant rock crashed through a cinderblock wall into the house before rolling through the living room and through another wall before coming to rest in a bedroom.
Caroline Sasaki, the homeowner, said her family had just moved in earlier in the month, after tearing down and rebuilding the house on the property.
"Last night, I was very shaken," she told KHON2. "I really didn’t know what happened except for the loud boom."
Four people were in the house during the incident. None were injured by the boulder.
Sasaki and other neighbors told KHON2 that events like this were extremely uncommon, and questioned whether a local developer's project further up the hill — where the boulder came down from — was responsible.
“We lived in this same location. We just knocked down the old house and rebuilt it; and it’s never happened before, heavy rain and hurricane warnings nothing. So, no rocks ever came down,” Sasaki told the TV station. "We’ve had some issues with them carving the mountain, and I don’t know if that’s the cause."
Hawaii News Now said investigators had fielded reports from another homeowner complaining that a smaller boulder, approximately 2 feet by 2 feet, had struck his property's retaining wall.
The uphill development's owner, Bingning Li, told Hawaii news outlets that his project and the boulder incidents were unconnected. He said protective measures put in place for his development actually mitigated the damage.
“Not at all, this is from way above, I looked at one of those rocks about 50 feet away from on top of the property and landed over there and then made its way down here,” Li told KHON2. "So it hit one of the cables that was supposed to stop it and the cable snapped. That took a lot of energy away otherwise this damage would be way more."
