Residents and businesses in Hanalei spent Tuesday cleaning up homes, stores and offices as the Kauai Emergency Management Agency worked to bring supplies to people stranded in Wainiha and Haena after heavy rains flooded large parts of the area.
While damage estimates have yet to be tallied, dozens of homes were flooded, and several were destroyed when the Hanalei River breached its banks.
Jane Abramo, president and principal broker of Na Pali Properties Inc., told Pacific Business News that nearly every one of the 20 vacation homes her company manages has taken on water. Those homes were all occupied by visitors at the time, too.
“Some of our houses are still surrounded by water, so we haven’t been able to get to them,” she said. “Our biggest challenge is we’ve got vacation rental homes with guests in Haena and they can’t get out unless they are evacuated.”
Abramo, whose office in the Ching Young Village Shopping Center in Hanalei had about a foot of water, said she could hear a steady flow of helicopters from the Hawaii National Guard flying overhead to help the stranded residents and visitors.
Donna Rice, a broker with Elite Pacific Properties, said that while most of the homes in Princeville, where her office is located, were in pretty good condition, one of her firm’s listings in Haena has been inaccessible.
“There are three landslides between us and it,” she said. “Nobody has been to the house as this point.”
Abramo said her firm is canceling reservations for its vacation homes in Haena, and “for the properties in Princeville or Hanalei, I’m discouraging people from coming.”
“If the home is inhabitable and they can’t cancel their other reservations, we’re letting them come,” she said. “If they don’t want to come, they get all their money back.”
Abramo said she didn’t give the owners of the homes a choice to remain open while properties are cleaned up and repaired.
“For me, it’s just better for us to hunker down, get our recovery down,” she said. “We’re going to be fine in a couple of weeks and then everybody can get back.”
She noted that the damage was no where near as bad as the damage inflicted by Hurricane Iniki in 1992, which devastated the whole island.
“This is localized,” she said. “It’s 90 percent cleanup, 10 percent damage. We were very lucky.”