KOLOA — Miriam Pagador said her daughter-in-law was preparing to do laundry when the water started rising Sunday around 5 p.m. inside their Koloa home.
“It happened really fast,” Pagador said. “We’ve had floods before, but it never came in the house. The last big flood, the water was just inches from the door, but it only flooded the patio. This time, the water was in the house and everything is ruined — the carpet, the appliances, the wooden floor, everything. We don’t have flood insurance, too. My father — this was his house — worked for the plantation, and we never needed flood insurance because the ditch man always maintained the ditch. It never flooded this bad.”
Cheryl Tennberg has a home in the affected area in the vicinity of Aloha Place and Waiuhohonou Road on Wailaau Road, where a cleanup operation continues after the weekend flooding.
“We were lucky because our house is a little higher in the neighborhood,” Tennberg said. “We had some of the neighbors’ cars parked near our place, and we still had water. There’s mud everywhere. When we called 9-1-1, the operators were disbelieving at first.”
The flooding of a Koloa neighborhood along Waihohonu Stream on Sunday destroyed the belongings of many residents. The stream that flows from the massive Waita Reservoir turned into a lake, flooding streets and inundating houses with brown water.
The estimated 5,000-foot-wide reservoir is the largest inland body of freshwater in the state. Water entering its spillway flows into several streams that were already full from recent rains.
The county continued cleanup this week by excavating with backhoes and removing hau bush and other dense vegetation to widen the stream’s banks and allow adequate water flow.
Huge piles of debris were pulled from the stream bed, and roads were cleared. Several county dump trucks lined the Koloa neighborhood entrance, removing multiple Dumpsters filled with waterlogged sofas, soggy carpets, ruined furniture and other saturated belongings from residents.
In Koloa, Teddy Blake was going door-to-door assessing residents’ immediate needs for The Hawaii Community Foundation.
“We don’t have flood insurance,” said Karen Shigematsu-Tone whose parents have had their home since the 1970s. “We’ve had floods before, but it has never been this bad. The water was all over the yard and came into the house.”
Leane Medeiros and Michael Machado were cleaning out her father’s house.
“Everything happened so fast, there was no time to move anything,” Medeiros said. “When we came to check on my father, the water was already up to my husband’s armpits. He was barely able to move in the muddy water.”
Tennberg said the water didn’t subside until after 11 p.m., leaving a big mess of mud and debris.
“The county’s response has been great,” Tennberg said. “They brought in big roll-offs for appliances and metal. There were others for non-metal, and they had heavy equipment pushing the mud off the roads and helping the neighborhood remove the damaged appliances and furniture to the roll-offs.”
Claresa Casticimo has been living in the area since 2010 and has never seen such devastation.
“It’s lucky we have flood insurance,” she said. “But we can’t get rid of anything until the appraiser comes. Everything is ruined because the water in the house was about 15 inches above the carpet line… everything is a mess. My son plays for the Kauai High School baseball team, and Coach Hank Ibia said he was going to have some of his boys come help, Saturday. That’s the day the appraiser is supposed to come, too. I’m going to take a break and go watch the baseball game. Maybe after Saturday, we can start getting rid of some of this damaged goods and start moving forward — have a sense of normalcy after all this.”
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Dennis Fujimoto, staff writer and photographer, can be reached at 245-0453 or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
