Hawaii out of danger as weaker Flossie moves west

HONOLULU, Aug 15 (Reuters) The island of Hawaii breathed a sigh of relief today as Hurricane Flossie weakened to tropical storm on its westward path, prompting cancellation of all storm warnings after two days on high alert.

The National Weather Service downgraded the once powerful Flossie to a tropical storm late yesterday as it passed South Point on the ''Big Island,'' the largest in the Hawaiian chain and home to 160,000 people.

The storm got no closer than 160 km of South Point, the southernmost point of the United States.

By (2030IST) today, the weather service canceled a tropical storm warning, a high surf warning and flash flood watches for the Big Island.

Surf did reach as high as 6 meters on southern shores late yesterday, said Troy Kindred, Hawaii County Civil Defense administrator.

''We were ready in the event that things got worse,'' said Kindred. ''I think this was a pretty close call.'' Flossie approached Hawaiian waters as a Category 4 hurricane, causing the weather service to put the island of Hawaii on hurricane watch and officials to declare a state of emergency on Monday.

The last time a hurricane hit Hawaii was 15 years ago.

On the Big Island, police, firefighters and civil defense officials spent yesterday night monitoring the storm's impact.

Reports from the field came in every hour.

''I'm happy to report we did not have much damage at all,'' Kindred said. ''With what the weather service had been saying, I feel incredibly lucky the way it turned out. That storm was well defined and moving at a brisk pace.'' Weather service officials had predicted up to 25 cm of torrential rain that never materialized and there were no reports of flooding, Kindred said.

It was a similar story with the wind. With the exception of 65 kph gusts at the normally blustery South Point, the rest of the island experienced winds of 24-32 kph.

At daybreak, Flossie was around 430 km south of Honolulu with sustained winds of 80 kph.

The storm was losing its strength so rapidly that it could become a tropical depression later today, Hawaii's Civil Defense said.

The island government said schools would remain closed today, but parks would reopen and shelters would be dismantled.

The last time a hurricane hit Hawaii was in 1992, when Iniki pummeled the island of Kauai, killing six people and causing estimated damages of 2.4 billion dollars.

REUTERS RSA BST2359