Hurricane Nolo Is Soaking Hawaii's Big Island. How to Document Flood and Mudslide Damage When the Power and Signal Are Unreliable

Hurricane Nolo is passing south of Hawaii's Big Island, and the main danger is water: forecasts call for up to 20 inches of rain on the Big Island, with flash flooding, mudslides and gusts up to 75 mph in parts of the Big Island and Maui County. The Weather Channel calls it the strongest hurricane impact on the Big Island in 67 years, since Hurricane Dot in 1959. Hurricane watches and warnings have been replaced by high wind warnings and flood watches as the storm moves slowly west, and forecasters expect it could strengthen to Category 3 over warmer water.

For residents, this is not a roof-blown-off event for most homes. It is water coming in through the ground floor, the carport and the lanai, mud coming down slopes, and power going out for hours or days. Documenting that kind of damage calls for a different approach than a standard storm checklist.

Safety Comes Before Photos

Nothing here is worth taking a risk for. Don't walk or drive through moving water. Stay away from slopes, gulches and road cuts while rain is falling, since mudslides can come with little warning. Don't enter a flooded room until the power to it is off. Follow county civil defense instructions. Everything below assumes you are safe and the water has stopped rising.

Shoot Before You Clean, in This Order

Adjusters decide water claims on three questions: how high did the water get, where did it come from, and what did it ruin. Your photos should answer all three, and the order you take them in matters because cleanup destroys the evidence.

1. The water line. Water leaves a mark on walls, cabinets and fences. Photograph it wide, showing the whole wall, then close with a tape measure held against it from the floor. That one close-up can settle what the claim covers.
2. The entry point. Under the door, through the carport, a blocked drain, mud coming off the slope behind the house. Adjusters need the cause as well as the damage, especially where flood and other perils are covered differently.
3. Every damaged room, wide then close. Stand in the doorway for the wide shot, then take one close-up for each damaged item: the swollen cabinet base, the soaked couch, the carpet, the water heater.
4. Contents with labels visible. Photograph the model and serial plates on appliances and electronics. It's much faster than looking up receipts later.
5. Mud and debris before removal. If a slide pushed mud against a wall or into the carport, photograph its depth against something with a known size before anyone shovels it.

Flood, Mudflow and Landslide Are Not the Same Claim

This is the part that catches people. Standard homeowners policies generally exclude flood. Flood is usually covered by a separate policy, often through the National Flood Insurance Program. The NFIP's definition of flood includes mudflow, a river of liquid mud moving over normally dry land, but not landslides or other earth movement. Whether damage counts as mudflow or landslide can decide whether a claim is paid.

You don't need to settle that in the driveway. But it's why your photos should show how the mud arrived: flowing in with water, with visible flow marks and a thin, wet, spread-out deposit, or as a mass of soil and rock that moved as a block. Take wide photos of the slope and the path the mud took, then close-ups of the deposit. Let your adjuster and your policy do the classifying.

Budget Your Battery Like It's the Only One You Have

With outages likely across the Big Island, your phone may be your only camera, flashlight and communication device for a day or more.

• Switch to low power mode now, before the battery is at 20%.
• Use airplane mode between shooting sessions. Hunting for a weak signal drains a battery faster than almost anything else.
• Take photos, not video, unless the video shows something photos can't, such as water still flowing in. A minute of 4K video uses far more battery and storage than twenty photos.
• Turn off cloud photo sync until power is back. Constant upload attempts over a bad connection waste battery and don't finish anyway.
• Charge from the car if it's safe to run it in an open area. Never run a generator or vehicle in a closed garage or carport.

Sending Photos When Bandwidth Is Scarce

Your insurer's app or email may want photos within days, while cell networks are still congested or partly down. A modern phone photo is 3 to 6 MB. Forty of them is 200 MB, which won't go through a one-bar connection.

Send compressed copies. A photo resized to 2000px on the long edge and compressed to 300 to 500 KB still shows water lines, labels and damage clearly. Compress a batch of 40 and you're sending about 16 MB instead of 200. Keep every original untouched on the phone, and copy it to a second device or cloud backup once you have power and a stable connection. If the insurer asks for originals later, you'll have them with the time and location metadata intact.

After the Storm Passes

When Nolo has moved away and conditions are safe, do a second round of photos over the following days. Mold, warped flooring and cracked foundations often only show up after things dry. Date-stamp that folder separately so it's clear these are follow-up findings, not missed damage from the first round.

Put both rounds into one organized, shareable gallery with one album per room, and you have a single link to send your adjuster, your landlord or a contractor, instead of 60 separate attachments.

Related reading:

• How to Photograph Storm Damage So Your Insurance Claim Doesn't Get Denied: the general storm documentation checklist
• Hurricane Season 2026 Evacuation Photo Backup Guide: protecting your photo library before you leave
• Compress Photos for Email Attachment Limits: fitting evidence under upload caps