An indoor camera captured the shocking moment when a boulder crashed through the family’s living room.
WASHINGTON — A homeowner from Hawaii is fortunate to be alive after a massive boulder fell into her family’s home less than a month after she moved in.
dramatic video from the house shows the path the boulder took as it sped through the family’s Honolulu living room late Saturday night, narrowly missing the woman.
In the video, family members can be seen checking on each other alongside the splintered wood and debris that ended up in the living room.
According to KHON2, a Hawaiian TV station, the boulder was about 5 feet tall and about 5 feet wide.
The TV station reported that the giant rock crashed into the home through a cinder block wall before rolling through the living room and another wall before coming to rest in a bedroom.
Caroline Sasaki, the homeowner, said her family only moved in earlier this month after she demolished and rebuilt the house on the property.
“I was very upset last night,” she told KHON2. “I really didn’t know what happened other than the loud bang.”
Four people were in the home during the incident. No one was injured by the boulder.
Sasaki and other neighbors told KHON2 that occurrences like this are extremely unusual and questioned whether a local developer’s project further up the hill – where the boulder came down – was responsible.
“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 there were never any stones coming down,” Sasaki told the TV network. “We had some issues with them carving the mountain and I don’t know if that’s the cause.”
Hawaii News Now said investigators had received reports from another homeowner who complained that a smaller boulder, about 2 feet by 2 feet, struck his property’s retaining wall.
The owner of the uphill development, Bingning Li, told Hawaii news agencies that his project and the boulder incidents were unrelated. He said protecting his development actually mitigated the damage.
“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 told KHON2. “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.”