‘I’ve lost everything’

HANAPEPE — A fire that gutted a historic Westside commercial building in Hanapepe Sunday destroyed one business and forced another to temporarily close.

Tenants say the two-story Seto market building at 4556 Awawa Road did not suffer structural damage and will likely be restored. However, the first-floor tenant, Hanapepe Naturals: Health Food and Spa, lost all of its uninsured equipment and inventory.

“I’ve lost everything,” said Susan Wilesmith, owner of Hanapepe Naturals. “I’ve lost $200,000 and I don’t even know if I can get up and running again.”

It had been a dream come true up to this point. After operating a small kitchen for eight years and massage business for 15 years in Kilauea, Wilesmith moved the businesses to Hanapepe with her first month’s rent and no deposit in June 2012. It was all she had.

The massage business generated the revenue to build a certified commercial cold kitchen one year ago, Wilesmith said. She reinvested profits and added the health food store. All three businesses generated $20,000 or more a month with five part-time employees.

“We were just booming,” Wilesmith said. “We were about to open a massage school in the beginning of the year.”

Around $150,000 in health food store inventory was lost in the front of the store. The middle was a café where coffee, smoothies and ayurvedic food was served. The “Super Green 528” certified kitchen in the back made more than 100 products for islandwide distribution, including organic supplements, skincare and various herbal blends.

Wilesmith also produced dehydrated organic snacks like granola, onion bread, kale chips, trail mixes, date bars, generating around $10,000 a month.

“It was really successful and was actually getting to the point where I could actually start kicking back a bit and stop the 16-hour days,” she said.

The massage center and spa operated out of the back. The three businesses seemed to pick up the slack for one another when one was slow.

“It was also exciting,” she said. “I watched something grow from nothing, from walking into bare shelves and then creating a very beautiful space — and so just seeing it blossom is just amazing.”

The couple was in the process of selecting an insurer for their inventory at the time of the fire. Around $2,000 worth of food inventory waiting to go out on Monday burned inside the back door.

Wilesmith said the owner would restore the building to the original lease design.

The owner’s liability insurance would not cover the investment and work by her carpenter husband, Michael Barretto, who renovated the space into the kitchen and store.

Wilesmith doesn’t know if she will start again. She is taking it “just one day at a time.”

 It was a good business for a suppressed location, she said, and many people enjoyed the peaceful river location.

“The river is so amazing,” she said. “The two places I loved the most in the whole store are the deck and the massagery and both were completely untouched by the fire.”

According to Barretto, the cause of the blaze appears to be lightning that struck at or near a utility pole and caused power lines to spark at a junction box under the building.

The massage room was on the opposite wall of the worst of the blaze and did not sustain damage other than smoke. The same was true of the upstairs tattoo studio, where the blaze did not spread outside of the storage room.

Kauai Fire Department responded to the alarm around 7:45 a.m. and 15 personnel from nine units had the blaze extinguished in about an hour. KFD estimated about $400,000 in damage to the structure and contents. No one was in the building or injured.

KFD investigators were on the scene Monday morning. An investigator said they hoped to have the report completed by the afternoon.

Samuel Shaw, owner of the second-floor business, Kulture Tattoo, said he felt fortunate the damage was limited to his storage room and windows. Had the fire gone on for a little longer, he said it may have ignited chemicals and that would have been a totally different story.

“Right now we have no power, no cable and no phone,” Shaw said. “I am just going through all the channels to get back going again.”

He said cleaning up smoke damage is the main task and he is helping the other business with their cleanup downstairs. The ventilation also sent a lot of smoke to the attic that has to be cleaned out, he said.

The building’s owner, Stanley Seto, or anyone from Seto Market Building LLC, could not be reached on Monday.

The original Seto market building was completed in 1921 and served as a general store, a bakery, a steakhouse and a liquor store. The building survived the great flood of 1963 and Hurricane Iwa in 1982, but was destroyed by Hurricane Iniki in 1992.

A replica building was constructed in 1996. The new construction included fire  retardant materials and drywall which helped contain the blaze.