Hurricane Lala left Pāhala cut off and put Nāʻālehu and Waiʻōhinu on partial isolation after flooding and road damage tore through Kaʻū on Hawaiʻi Island. Emergency responders were still working Monday to reconnect communities that had already lost road access, power and emergency communications.
The storm passed within 35 miles of Hawaiʻi Island at hurricane strength on Saturday night, and by Sunday morning the damage was clear enough to turn a routine recovery effort into a race against time. More than half of Hawaiian Electric’s customers on the island woke up without power, and officials said some homes could remain dark for weeks.
The scale of the damage became harder to ignore after the mayor’s aerial survey over Kaʻū on Sunday morning. Darryl Oliveira said he counted six bridges that were significantly damaged or destroyed and that the storm had likely caused long-term damage to roads and bridges in the district. He described it as the worst flooding damage he had seen in Kaʻū, and the loss of access had an immediate cost: Pāhala’s only hospital sits in the community that was completely cut off.
That hospital mattered enough for Oliveira to single it out. “That’s a critical access hospital for us, and so we need to get access to that ASAP,” he said, a line that captures the pressure now facing Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation crews and the county’s Department of Public Works as they try to restore a roadway connection to Pāhala. Nāʻālehu and Waiʻōhinu were only reachable from Kona as of Sunday, while the highway heading toward Hilo remained blocked.
Even the emergency system was strained. Early Monday, the Hawaiʻi Police Department said the 911 emergency telephone number was not working because phone and radio services on the island had been affected by Lala, forcing callers to use 808-935-3311 from a land line or 808-961-8336 from a cell phone. In Nāʻālehu and Waiʻōhinu, residents called as their neighborhoods flooded, and responders launched search-and-rescue operations. One resident was swept away, later found Sunday morning and taken to a hospital with moderate injuries.
No additional missing-person reports were available, even as the damage spread. At least 100 homes on Hawaiʻi Island were reported damaged, and one house was swept off its foundation by flooding. Farther north, parts of Laupāhoehoe on the Hāmakua Coast got more than three and a half feet of rain by Sunday morning, while Hawaiʻi County opened a damage report form and Vibrant Hawaiʻi began fielding requests for assistance. For Kaʻū, the immediate question is not whether the storm left scars — it clearly did — but how quickly roads, bridges, power and emergency access can be restored in communities that were suddenly cut off from the rest of the island.
