Rental car driven directly into Honokohau Harbor, again
By Jeremy Lee
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KAILUA KONA, Hawaii (KITV) — For the second time in a matter of weeks, a tourist drove a rental car off of a boat ramp and straight into Honokohau Harbor, on the west coast of the Big Island. How similar were the 2 incidents? Same boat ramp, same harbor, same bewildered reaction.
“Just get out of that vehicle!” Drew Solmonson and his son shouted to the woman, who had decided to retrieve a bag of her belongings from the back seat. “Now! Before it goes under!” The video captured the woman delaying, as the blue SUV fills with water. At one point, she tries to turn off the windshield wipers that she had accidentally set off, while escaping through the window of the inundated car. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, over the last month even. And in both incidents, bystanders stepped in to help the wayward tourists to safety. “We actually threw her a flotation device,” Solmonson told KITV4 at Honokohau Harbor. “She used it to basically swim to our boat, and we pulled her out.” The scene was reminiscent of a similar event one month earlier. “The excuse was the same – and they thought it was a puddle. It was raining both nights,” Blake McCormick of Kona boat rentals said, “But on the other side you have a sailboat tied to one side during the first time– and you have a boat coming on the other side the next time. So it’s hard to say why they’re taking it down a boat ramp. ” That mystery deepens. KITV4 and tour operators we spoke with have tried to see if a GPS app (Google, Apple or Waze) will lead a vehicle onto the boat ramp. They won’t. All three apps show water where the boat ramp is, and not a roadway. A witness to the first incident says the Manta Ray tour company the two ladies were trying to find in late April, does not go out on Mondays. This means the latest tourist from Monday night wasn’t trying to find the same tour company location as in the previous incident. But tourists do universally meet at a nearby restroom pavilion, which can be seen on Apple Maps. The GPS instructs the driver to turn right before the boat ramp. On Google Maps, the right turn is there too– though less pronounced visually and with a dotted line extending forward indicating a walk. Waze also shows the right turn before the boat ramp. The driver in the first incident told the tour operator she was looking at the navigation app on her phone when she thought she hit a puddle.
The advice from one of the men who jumped in to save her: “Don’t trust the Google map lady.” What’s more, in reality, there isn’t a neatly defined road as depicted in the maps, but drivers enter into an open lot, while headed straight in the direction of the boat ramp. “It’s just trusting technology too much,” McCormick theorized. That may explain part of it– but the evidence shows technology isn’t trying to lure drivers off of dry land. Human error, unfortunately, appears to have played a substantial role in the unusual outcomes.
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