WAILUA — Jason Smith, a manager at Kintaro Japanese Restaurant, worked the last shift Thursday and left at 11 p.m.
By the time he heard about the fire and returned an hour later, he said the flames were, “Big. Big.”
“It was shooting through all the venting,” he said Friday morning. “I guess they said when the oxygen got through the garage, it just branched out, you know — went out the side gate, up into the roof. There had to be like three or four fire trucks surrounding the building.”
A fire started in the back of the building not long after the restaurant closed, and got out of control in a hurry.
Firefighters from the Kapaa station arrived at 11:45 and “found the building’s garage fully engulfed in flames,” a county press release said Friday.
There were no injuries.
When Smith returned to the restaurant a little before midnight and saw the size of the blaze, he was worried firefighters might not be able to contain it.
“I got here. Cops were here. Firemen came right after that, and then they just started fighting it — pulled their truck here,” he said, pointing to the parking lot in front of a burnt hole in the side of the building.
“They were going at it,” he said. “Then, two more trucks came. The one from Koloa came, from the other side, they got a big ladder, shot it from the sky down. And, yeah, by that time, if they didn’t have the one from Koloa it would have been just impossible to get down. It was big, man.”
According to the press release, it took crews from five different stations two hours to get the fire under control and another three hours to fully extinguish the flames.
When the owners and staff of Kintaro arrived Friday morning, they found good news and bad news. The interior of the dining area suffered smoke and water damage but was left almost entirely untouched by the flames. Even the fish in the tank survived.
But the garage and kitchen were ruined. The steel door to the restaurant’s big walk-in freezer had melted off the hinges, and with the electricity cut off, it would be a matter of time before Kintaro’s entire seafood supply started smelling up the neighborhood.
Smith joined employees, friends and family as they cleared burnt rubbish out of the charred garage and kitchen.
“The door melted down,” Smith said. “We got a Konohiki fridge coming right now — save what we can.”
A few minutes later, a pickup pulling a refrigerated trailer drove into the parking lot.
Uncles put on gloves and hospital masks and started pulling soggy, ash-covered cardboard boxes labeled “Raw Shrimp” out of the freezer, and hauled huge containers of carrots and cabbage from the refrigerator. Aunties gathered around the back of the fridge trailer with heavy duty trash bags that they stuffed full of anything salvageable.
Most of the lobster tails were still good. Some of the hamachi didn’t make it.
Bond Kim-Anderson, 22, works at Kintaro. Her uncle and sister own the restaurant. She took a break from the salvage work sometime around noon and talked about what it was like to watch flames eat her family’s livelihood.
“I was actually working last night. We left at like 10:30, and then we just saw a Snapchat of the restaurant on fire. And so I called my mom, and she was already here,” she said. “So we just came down and just watched them put it out.”
“We could see it coming down from Homesteads, so that’s pretty big,” Kim-Anderson continued. “And when we were coming down the hill, I could just see it — flames. When we came in, it was pretty much just the garage that we could see that was on fire. And then there was all the fire trucks and the ladder that was involved, ‘cause I guess the roof caved in.”
She guessed that the restaurant will have to stay closed for repairs for at least six months. When asked what she plans to do now, she thought for a second and said, “Um, help fix the restaurant, considering it’s family. Also, look for another job, which is not too bad.”
Kim-Anderson is in the same boat as the rest of the Kintaro employees — she estimated there are at least 50 of them.
Kim-Anderson’s uncle, Chung Kim, is one of the owners of Kintaro. He was busy trying to get the water and electricity back on and dealing with insurance representatives, but he walked by at one point. Kim-Anderson said she thought he was holding up pretty well.
“He’s in pretty good spirits considering,” she said. “I mean, you always gotta make a good situation out of a bad one, right?”
Kim-Anderson looked over her shoulder at her family and friends sifting through food and ash. Her mother shook open a big black garbage bag and held it open while another woman dumped in a box of half-frozen shrimp.
“We all try to help out as much as we can — keep us going,” she said.
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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.
