Molokai residents wait for repairs nearly two months after second Kona Low

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – When the second Kona Low storm struck Hawaii in March, Molokai resident Sumu Asano remembered seeing rushing runoff about three feet high blanket his neighborhood, Kapaakea Hawaiian Homestead in Kaunakakai.

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“Water went straight underneath the house, climbed up straight over to the edge, and broke my wall in front that protects us from the tide and the waves,” Asano said. “It went straight over, right through everything, completely underwater.”

While the water filled the underneath of the house with mud and debris, the structure itself was not harmed.

Thinking quickly, Asano moved his truck, “because the land started to collapse.” He was surprised the flood’s force did not cause more damage.

Asano lives next to one of the two ditches that drain rainwater from the homestead. Both trenches overflowed during the storm, causing the walls bordering them to crumble.

Nearly two months after the second Kona low, Asano has been working with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to rebuild the ditch wall.

“It’s kind of sad, I mean, a lot of people in our neighborhood, our homestead, we want to get back to regular normalcy, having to go in and out of our houses, seeing our yards cleaned and set,” Asano said.

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Kalani Fronda, the department’s acting administrator of its land development division, said, “Our hope is that we can start to work locally with our district office as well as with some of our contractors to be able to address that and really expedite the process.”

Fronda added that the department will work to stabilize the affected areas over the coming weeks.

Asano pointed to two mounds of dirt sitting in his yard that he said DHHL gathered and left there a few weeks ago for the work.

“Some of it (the work) may trigger certain types of state and federal regulatory issues, so we have to be kind of very careful of how we do that,” Fronda said. “These discussions are active, and we gotta continue to really work together and build that Pilina because it really takes a village.”

Looking long-term, the department plans to widen the culvert mauka of Kamehameha V Highway that feeds into the ditches to mitigate future flood damage.

“The reason for it is the size of it is inadequate, and so we’re actually building it three times the size,” Fronda said.

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Fronda expects the expansion could take about two to four years.