Flying blind: Honolulu officials held off evacuations as North Shore flooded

In the days since a destructive flood swept through Oʻahu’s North Shore, residents have been asking why they weren’t told to evacuate until their cars were floating barges, until they had to wade and even swim away from their homes.

At first, officials’ answers were unsatisfying: Evacuating was a difficult call to make. We didn’t want people driving through flooded roads in the dark. We had already prepared people well. This storm caught us by surprise.

But a closer look back raises other questions, about broken equipment and overlooked warning signs – notably, that a stream gauge near Otake Camp showed water rising rapidly before the rest of Waialua flooded – that combined to put thousands at risk.

For many critical hours, Civil Beat found, city officials were flying blind.

The city’s emergency operations center had been up and running since 10 p.m. and was fully staffed that night, according to spokesperson Molly Pierce, with heads of the police and fire departments as well as agencies dealing with infrastructure, transportation and emergency medical care.

But Randal Collins, director of the city’s emergency management department, told Civil Beat they were operating with a limited amount of information, vague weather forecasts and low visibility through the dark and downpour that made assessing the situation on the ground difficult.

As leader of the emergency operations center that night, Collins said he accepts full responsibility for how the city managed the flood.

“I’ll take ownership of the decisions we made that night,” he said.

Flying Blind

Emergency management officials in Hawaiʻi and around the country rely on forecasts from the National Weather Service to inform decisions about where to deploy resources, when to tell people to evacuate and how to explain the severity of an impending natural disaster to the public.

But those forecasts failed to adequately predict the weather system barreling toward Oʻahu, touching off a chain reaction.

Lacking a clear understanding of how much rain would fall and where, emergency officials were left flatfooted in coming up with a response. They shrugged off rising water levels at the stream that served as their best indicator that flooding would be worse than expected, putting them hours behind in warning the public even as streets filled with feet of water.

Weather patterns over the Hawaiian Islands seemed to be unpredictable on the night of March 19. In the afternoon and into the early evening, experts were estimating just a few inches of rain on Oʻahu. A NWS report that afternoon said it would be about a quarter of an inch. Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said he was told that evening to expect 2 to 3 inches over the course of eight to 10 hours.

But experts were not confident in their forecasts. “For tonight into Friday, there is atypically high uncertainty for such a short lead time,” a NWS report said.

In particular, meteorologists had a difficult time determining where exactly rain would fall over the course of the night. A doppler radar located on Molokaʻi had been out of commission due to motor issues since March 12, according to the weather service, and wouldn’t be repaired for another few days.

That radar would have allowed meteorologists to estimate the location and intensity of rainfall out a few hours on Oʻahu. In a historically rainy winter that broke records across the state and triggered repeated evacuations, service logs show the radar had faced extended outages since late November.

The radar outage, Collins said, contributed to the “vagueness of information” that officials received and hampered their ability to make decisions.

Throughout the evening, water had been rising at streams and reservoirs across the island. One in particular, the gauge in the Kaukonahua Stream near Otake Camp, serves as a critical indicator of possible storm flows in Waialua. By 8:25 p.m., the water level there had surged 2 feet in as many hours.

The National Weather Service modified its prediction: Heavy showers would be moving toward Oʻahu throughout the night. Mayor Blangiardi would later say that 10 inches of rain fell in two hours, “a phenomenon known as a rain bomb.”

The first flash flood advisory went out at 8:52 p.m. on Thursday. It was sent via HNL Alerts, the city’s system for notifying the public of an emergency. But there are two problems with HNL Alerts: people have to sign up to receive the text messages, and only 11% of Oʻahu’s population, or about 110,000 people, have done so.

‘Something’s Coming’

Residents in the low-lying areas of Waialua and Haleʻiwa are no strangers to flood warnings. Many had taken city officials and weather experts at their word that this storm would be less severe than recent ones, particularly the previous weekend’s Kona low.

But they began to sense that something about this storm was different.

Otake Camp resident Wendell Toki was on the phone with his mom at around 9 p.m. as the rain poured down.

He stuck his head out the window and could smell the Kaukonahua Stream rushing just behind his home. At that point, the stream was rising about a quarter inch every minute.

There were other signs that made Toki worry: a bucket he left out to measure rainfall was already full and his dog kept barking at the river. But it was his birds that gave him pause.

He had a couple dozen pigeons and more than 100 chickens. The fowls, usually clucking and crowing, were silent.

“My grandpa always said ‘You listen to the animals. If you don’t hear no birds chirping, something wrong. Something’s coming,’” Toki said. “And that’s the truth. Animals know faster than us.”

But by nightfall, the only flood advisory put out by the city was for all of Oʻahu. When residents of the North Shore went to sleep, they had no clue they were about to be inundated with an unfathomable amount of rain – fast.

When John Sivigny checked outside, he saw about an inch of water in his yard on Waialua Beach Road. The alert he’d received so far still was only advisory, indicating residents should remain vigilant but weren’t in immediate danger. He went to bed around 10 p.m. without thinking much of it.

Across the island in Downtown Honolulu, officials stood up their emergency operations center to coordinate any response as the storm developed. From a seat between the chiefs of fire and police, Collins monitored a number of factors including rainfall levels, stream gauges, reports from the NWS and calls from first responders in the field.

Things were looking more serious, but nothing terribly alarming yet.

The first flash flood warning for the entire northern half of Oʻahu – everything from Waiʻanae in the west to Waikāne in the east – went out at 10:57 p.m. Cellphones blared warning that flash flooding was expected shortly or had already started. Rain, the warning indicated, was falling at a rate of 1 to 3 inches an hour. Streams and drainage ditches around Waialua were rapidly filling with water.

A couple minutes later, at 11 p.m., the gauge near Otake Camp measured the stream at about 24 feet deep. Around half an hour later, it had risen nearly 3 feet – quickly approaching 28 feet, the level at which the stream would start to flood.

Collins, the Honolulu emergency management director, said officials were monitoring those stream levels. But Otake Camp, he said, is prone to flooding. The rising waters weren’t alarming enough to issue an evacuation notice yet.

Just a week before, on March 13, that same level of water had triggered more concern. Otake Camp was evacuated when the stream hit 29 feet.

Not so on the night of March 19. By 11:40 p.m., the stream would hit 28 feet. Ten minutes later, it was at 29.3. By midnight, the level was over 30 feet. Still no evacuation order.

“It didn’t raise as many alarm bells as maybe we wish it had,” Collins said.

‘Flooding Conditions Will Rapidly Worsen’

The floodwaters had quickly reached several feet deep by the time Levi Rita had left his house at Dillingham Ranch at 11:30 p.m.

“Hard to even think about how much water there was. Ungaugeable kind of water,” Rita said. “Put it this way: it buried a Dodge truck.”

“The river was flowing through my house,” he added.

He and a few friends got to work rescuing horses, driving a backhoe with high tires that could make it through the waters. As the night went on, Rita would use that same machine to rescue neighbors across Waialua from their rooftops.

Shortly after at 11:39 p.m. the National Weather Service pushed out a notice to people’s phones warning of a “dangerous and life-threatening situation.”

“Flash flooding is ongoing potentially making roadways impassable,” it said. “Flooding conditions will rapidly worsen as additional heavy rain continues to fall over the next hour.”

At Otake Camp, Wendell Toki had left on his own but then swam back in to rescue a stranded girl. They escaped, but he would lose his house and his birds.

The severity of the flooding still wasn’t sinking in at the Emergency Operations Center. For several hours, the city’s response continued to lack urgency. Around midnight, Collins said officials remained focused on water levels in reservoirs, particularly Wahiawā and in Nuʻuanu. If the dams failed, they could kill thousands.

“Other than that,” Collins said. “We heard it’s raining. It’s raining hard. But we certainly didn’t have any level of awareness of the severity, at least at that point, that would have caused an evacuation order.”

Between 12:30 and 1 a.m., John Sivigny’s neighbors on Waialua Beach Road were calling each other to share what they were witnessing. One neighbor already had water in her first-floor house. At Sivigny’s, the water had gone up about 2.5 feet in three hours. It was now just about three inches below his steps, right at the base of his red front door.

“I had 15 minutes and the water was in my house,” he said.

Sivigny and his wife Maureen Clarke kept their phones right next to their bed, but they hadn’t gotten any alarms specific to the North Shore. They started checking the levels at the Wahiawā Dam in the mountains just above them; it was just peaking over the crest of the dam’s spillway at 80 feet.

“All of us who live here,” Sivigny said, “we’re already dam savvy.”

Levels at the stream near Otake Camp were climbing. They had already reached 32 feet by 12:15 a.m. Forty five minutes later, they had gone up to 34.93 feet – the last transmission before the gauge stopped sending data.

About a mile upstream, Sivigny and his wife could hardly walk through the river that had formed in their yard as they struggled to get their trucks up a slight slope on the side of the road. Water was up to the seats.

In the course of just a few hours, water was getting deep fast across the North Shore.

Over at Jesse Lovert’s house on Olohio Street near Farrington Highway, the neighborhood had gone from no flooding at 11:30 p.m. to kneehigh waters by 1 a.m. Near Otake, people later recounted stories of their friend carrying her toddler on her shoulders in water deeper than her chest.

On Waialua Beach Road, Heather Nakahara called 911 at about 1:30 a.m. to ask for help as water quickly rose waist-deep in her bedroom. Emergency responders, the dispatcher told her, couldn’t reach her. The road was already impassable. Don’t go outside, they said.

Nakahara ended up trapped in her closet, hoping neither her loved ones nor her pets would die. She and her husband weren’t rescued for another seven hours.

For almost three hours after the 11 p.m. flash flood warning was issued, city officials didn’t send another alert, leaving residents in the dark as many started to escape in rapidly rising waters. By the time city officials issued their next flash flood warning at 1:52 a.m., people had already been swimming for their lives.

Warnings For People Already Swimming

Eighteen-year-old Nuutea Van Bastolaer made the call to flee the house in Long Bridge with his girlfriend and his younger sister at 1:14 a.m. on March 20. The neighborhood between Haleʻiwa Road and Waialua Beach Road didn’t have standing water less than two hours before. Now it was up to about 3 or 4 feet deep.

The three of them decided not to go out the front door where cars were floating down the swift current of the floods. Instead, they went around the back and jumped a neighbor’s fence to get to the street. Water on the other side went up to Van Bastolaer’s chest.

“You guys are gonna follow me, you hear me?” he told his sister and girlfriend. “Hold onto each other. Come, come.”

The teenager led the group, all wearing yellow fluorescent raincoats, down the stairs and into the street, now a river. His girlfriend started recording on her cellphone. Brown water was up to their waists and moving fast. Water heaters and washing machines floated alongside them.

“Hold on, the current is really strong,” one of the girls called out as they picked their way through the neighborhood. Van Bastolaer called out to his neighbors as he went, trying to wake up as many as he could.

At points, his 12-year-old sister’s feet couldn’t touch the ground. The boy wrapped his arms around the two girls and grabbed onto a coconut palm, water rushing around them. They stayed like that for 15 or 20 minutes. When they could move again, they dropped their bags and Van Bastolaer threw his sister on his back and carried on.

The flood was unlike anything he’d seen before. The area floods three or four times a year. Water usually gets to ankle high, maybe knee high. When he gets the alert, the 18-year-old just carries his bags out with his rainboots on and heads to work. But the night of March 19 was different.

In the emergency operations center, officials began discussing sending an evacuation order just before another alert went to cellphones at 2:22 a.m. telling residents that emergency vehicles could be delayed due to flooding.

Collins, the emergency management director, told Civil Beat that officials opted to still hold off because they feared that sending an evacuation notice then would have sent people into the path of floodwater. Instead, they continued monitoring the situation.

The weather service, though, did not hold back, sending an alert at 3:16 in the morning to all cellphones, telling residents to “SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”.

As Collins watched water levels in the Wahiawā reservoir continue to rise, he heard from the weather service that heavy rain would continue, and learned from units in the field that roads were inaccessible. He finally made the decision to advise residents to evacuate if they could at 3:42 a.m.

That alert included advice to escape to rooftops if water filled a home. Neighbors rescued people using surf boards, backhoes and Jet Skis.

Shelters opened as residents, drenched from the rain and the floods, filed in. The first civil defense sirens sounded at 4:23 a.m. But one siren in the middle of Waialua at a district park wasn’t working, and a resident living close to another siren at Farrington Highway said the alarm was barely audible over the noise of the storm.

The sirens are typically used for tsunami, but state and county officials can trigger them for other hazards including wildfires and floods. Fifteen of the 176 sirens on Oʻahu were awaiting repairs or replacement during the storms of the last two weeks.

Honolulu officials issued an evacuation order at around 5:30 a.m. as more residents emerged to find their streets flowing like rapids.

Rescue efforts continued, and crowds at shelters swelled until just before 8:30 a.m. Water levels in the Wahiawā reservoir peaked at just over 85 feet, less than 3 feet from the crest of the dam.

Sirens went off again and emergency notifications appeared on cellphones warning people that the 120-year-old Wahiawā Dam, which does not comply with modern safety standards, had failed.

It had not actually failed, emergency officials clarified 30 minutes later, but by then the National Guard had already begun evacuating the evacuation shelter at Waialua High School in case it did.

The Confrontation

The crowd in the auditorium at Waialua Elementary School grumbled as Honolulu’s mayor told the residents assembled on Tuesday night what his administration had been doing during and after the flood.

The fact that there were no fatalities, Blangiardi said, was a credit to the first responders.

“I’m talking about people who are in dangerous situations, who could have died,” he said. “We talk about a rescue, it’s at that level.”

In the back rows, men in mud-stained clothes with work boots caked in red clay began to shift, muttering about how it had been locals in their backhoes out rescuing people long before first responders arrived on the scene.

Someone in the crowd interrupted to ask why the city didn’t have a plan for clearing all the debris that piled up during the storm. “What would you do?” Blangiardi shot back. “I’ll tell you what we did do.”

The room erupted.

“Don’t point fingers at us, what we did. We did everything. So don’t ask us what we did,” Waialua resident Mana Merrill called out from the back, his voice echoing over the rest. “You guys only came in today. We’ve been here four days, five days. If it wasn’t for the Ritas, the Souzas, the Brandon Rice’s – people would have died.”

The crowd applauded their neighbors and others who had stepped into the void to help.

“If they never come in with their loaders, people would have died,” Merrill said. “I’m telling you right now.”

Similar frustrations flared over the course of the more than two-hour meeting. The community, still reeling from frantic escapes and coming to terms with the level of destruction, had little patience. Why, several people asked, hadn’t there been more warnings?

Levi Rita stepped up to the mayor in the front of the room and summarized what many seemed to be thinking.

“Can we have an apology?” he asked, gesturing to the row of officials from various city departments.

“Levi, what do you want us to apologize for?” Blangiardi asked.

“I just want everybody to apologize to the community for failing,” Rita said.

But Rita wouldn’t get what he was looking for.

“I know you’ve done incredible work,” Blangiardi said. “But I’m not asking anyone on my team to apologize because you don’t know the work that’s been going on for the last four days.”

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Civil Beat reporter Ben Angarone contributed to this report.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.