Hurricane Iniki remembered by Kauai mayors 30 years after devastation

Sep. 11—Of the nearly 22, 000 residents on the island at the time, almost all experienced some kind of damage to their property. More than 2, 000 houses were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Some 4, 000 others sustained serious damage.

On the day after Hurricane Iniki smashed into Kauai 30 years ago today, then-Mayor JoAnn Yukimura toured the ravaged island in a helicopter with Gov. John Waihee.

The devastation was overwhelming, she recalled in an interview last week. But she also was heartened by the people she saw clearing their yards and repairing their roofs, and even some who waved at the helicopter.

"That was the spirit that told me we're going to do it. We're going to make it !" Yukimura said.

From the air, the verdant mountains of Kauai appeared burnt and bare, she said, and the Na Pali Coast's normally spectacular cliffs had been transformed into a brown, leafless haze.

Yukimura said she grew emotional as the aircraft approached the south side of the island and she had trouble recognizing the landscape.

"It looked like giant claws had scraped the coastline, " she said. It was not until Yukimura saw the Koloa Mill that she finally got her bearings.

Earlier on the day after the storm, 15-year-old Derek Kawakami, who would go on to become the current mayor of Kauai, emerged from his relatively unscathed Lihue home into a scene of broken trees, blown roofs, downed power lines and scattered debris.

"Two doors down there was a house that looked like it was hit by a bomb, " Kawakami recalled. Another house with a roof of blue tiles appeared to have come apart "like it was built out of Legos."

Kawakami was asked by his father, Charles Kawakami, president and CEO of Big Save Markets, to drive him in his 4-by-4 vehicle to the Lihue store so he could assess the damage along with a Civil Defense official.

During the difficult and slow drive, the younger Kawakami saw utility poles scattered about like piles of chopsticks and trees stripped of their branches. He wondered whether his friends and family were still alive and concluded, "This island is never going to get fixed."

MEMORIES OF the costliest and most powerful storm on record to strike Hawaii will forever be seared in the minds of the two mayors, one who was leading at the time and the other who experienced the devastation through the eyes of a teenager.

On Sept. 11, 1992, Iniki made landfall on the south side of Kauai with winds blasting at 145 mph. The storm caused more than $7 billion in damage when adjusted for inflation, according to a 2014 University of Hawaii study.

Of the nearly 22, 000 residents on the island at the time, almost all experienced some kind of damage to their property. More than 2, 000 houses were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Some 4, 000 others sustained serious damage.

Wind was the biggest factor driving the destruction, but dozens of homes and buildings along the coast were destroyed due to surf damage, and all of the major resorts were rendered inoperable, especially those along the South Shore, where 22-foot wave surges swept as much as 800 feet inland.

When Kawakami remembers Iniki, what comes to mind is the fact he had just made the Kauai High School varsity football team as a sophomore. On Thursday, Sept. 10, his coaches were preparing the team to play Kapaa High School the next night.

That game never happened.

On the morning of Sept. 11, the warning sirens blared early and his father woke him up to tell him he had to go to work to help people buy provisions for the storm, expected to arrive that afternoon. Kawakami was a courtesy clerk at the store, and he specifically remembers the anguish and concern on the faces of the folks who lined up to get in to shop that day.

"I remember that particular moment like it was yesterday, " he said.

Back at home later that day, the winds and debris battered his home as he and his family hunkered down. The glass windows flexed as if they were breathing, and family members had to yell in order to communicate.

"That wind—it was an ominous sound, " Kawakami said.

YUKIMURA WAS at an Oahu fundraiser on Sept. 10 but was summoned home late that night, hitching a ride on a military flight. She went straight to the historic county building in Lihue, with its emergency operations center in the basement, and helped secure last-minute public shelter arrangements.

She spent the night on the floor of her office.

The next day Yukimura manned her post as Category 4 Hurricane Iniki stormed the Garden Island roughly between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. From a window inside the county building, she watched the roof fly off the Big Save shopping center across the street.

Ten years after Hurricane Iwa, a Category 1 storm, ravaged the island, Kauai was decimated again. This time the storm destroyed 50 % of the island's power lines. Telephone service was lost. Four weeks into the disaster, only 20 % of the island's electricity was restored.

Despite the widespread damage, only a few people lost their lives during Iniki. One woman on Kauai died of a heart attack when part of her house fell on her, while a man was killed by flying debris as he was dashing to a neighbor's house with his own residence falling apart. About 100 people were injured from the storm.

For the disaster response, Yukimura gave lots of credit to Tom Batey, her managing director, a veteran Hawaii State Civil Defense official who took up his new position only a month prior to Iniki.

Batey knew what he was doing. For example, while he was waiting for Yukimura to return to Kauai just before the storm, he was busy doing the necessary work in anticipation of asking for state and federal hurricane assistance. He wrote out a three-page memo for the mayor to give the governor, asking for every type of aid Kauai was going to need.

"That was the memo that the mayor of New Orleans didn't send after Katrina, and it caused a lot of trouble, " Yukimura said.

The arduous cleanup and rebuilding would go on for years, with one Poipu hotel not reopening for 16 years.

Kauai's economy only returned to pre-Iniki levels seven or eight years after the storm, according to the 2014 study by the UH Economic Research Organization, and still hadn't rebounded in terms of its population and labor force.

TODAY, THERE aren't a lot of visual reminders of Hurricane Iniki on Kauai—with one rather large exception : the Coco Palms Resort.

The legendary hotel, famously featured in Elvis Presley's 1961 film "Blue Hawaii, " was shuttered when Iniki hit and never reopened for various reasons. The dilapidated structure sits on busy Kuhio Highway despite proposals by a number of developers over the years to bring the resort back to life.

The latest proposal is still alive after a Utah company bought the property for $22 million in a foreclosure auction last year, with plans to knock down the old structure and build a 350-room resort.

Kauai has heard that before, and a Kauai Planning Commission meeting last month drew dozens of unhappy residents to testify in opposition to the latest resort plans.

Kawakami said he's saddened by the 30-year plight of the Coco Palms, considering its illustrious past as one of Hawaii's premier resorts. If he had his way, the vulnerable property close to the shore would be returned to its natural state to help absorb the impact of the next big storm.

With climate change elevating storm concerns, it doesn't seem very wise to rebuild in the exact same spot, Kawakami said.

"What do they think will be the outcome the next time there's another extreme weather event ?" the mayor said.

That event may not be far away. A growing amount of research points to the likelihood of more hurricanes passing through the region as tropical cyclones that previously churned to the south shift pole-ward as waters grow warmer at higher latitudes.

Kawakami said the island will be ready the next time a hurricane hits.

"We take storms seriously on Kauai, " he said, adding that the island's resiliency was demonstrated following the 50-inch "rain bomb " event of 2018, which caused $180 million in damage, wrecked hundreds of homes and unleashed landslides that cut off the island's north shore communities for months.

Yukimura said a stricter building code, emergency generators backing up every water source and the county's updated, state-of-the-art communications center at Kauai Police Department headquarters add to the island's readiness.

Looking back, Yukimura said there was "a positive spiritual side " to Iniki, one that she described as a "collective near-death experience for the people of the island."

"Hurricane 'Iniki made us realize what was truly important, " the former mayor said in a statement of remembrance issued Friday. "It made us appreciate the facilities, services and amenities we had taken for granted—running water and hot showers, for example.

"When it seemed we had lost everything, we realized we had a lot—our lives, our loved ones, our neighbors and friends, and the will to rebuild better and stronger. We showed ourselves and the world that we could survive—and then thrive."