By 3:30 p.m. Friday, it looked like the worst of Hurricane Iniki was over on Oahu. But—as ominous satellite photos clearly showed—the island of Kauai was bearing the brunt of the storm. With all communication with the island cut off, we on Oahu could only shudder at the thought of what was happening across the Kauai Channel. The next morning, Weekly editor Julia Steele was offered a chance to fly to Kauai on a National Guard plane and be among the first from outside the island to witness the destruction wrought by Iniki. This is her report:
Early Saturday morning, from the porthole of a National Guard C-130—loaded with several tons of MREs, one Jeep and twenty-five sweat-soaked journalists sporting earplugs—Lihue didn’t look too bad: The coconut grove by the airport was thrashed but still standing, the nearby Westin resort looked to be in one piece. Once on the ground, however, the devastation was obvious. Helicopters and sheets of corrugated metal were strewn around the edge of the runway. The roofs of the hangers were gone. The lobby was full of shattered glass and twisted metal. Crew members from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park production—which was scheduled to finish shooting on the island Friday—paced back and forth, trying to charter a plane and get their 140 members back to L.A. The few other tourists at the airport looked dazed, exhausted, a little desperate.
Over at the Westin, Chris Hemmeter’s luxurious folly, things looked like something out of a ’70s disaster movie. “No food, no water, no power, no vacancy, no kidding,” read a scrawled note in the darkened lobby. “The airports and roads are closed. Please do not use the toilets in your rooms. Toilets are available in the banquet rooms; please take a bucket of water from the reflecting pool to flush.” Down at the bar, one of the few—if not the only—places on the island where cold beer was available, people were trading hurricane survival stories and getting drunk. Back by the pool, two women lying on chaise lounges in their bathing suits could only laugh; they’d just weathered Andrew’s fury and had come to Kauai to escape South Florida.
As soon as the plane hit the ground, the press piled out and started looking for stories. A young couple standing behind a barricade had three microphones in their faces in rapid succession. I wandered out and looked across the street; the field on the other side of the road was also strewn with trashed helicopters. Two local guys—charter boat operator Mickey Theade and window tinter Bernard Odo, neighbors from Eleele—pulled up in a jeep. They were looking for Theade’s friend, who runs the Fly Kauai airplane charter; since he was nowhere in sight, they did a couple of interviews with the journalists milling about and then decided to head down to Nawiliwili Harbor to see how boats there had fared. They agreed to take me and freelance reporter March Egerton with them.
On the barely passable road out of the airport, traffic lights were skewed at weird angles, utility poles and wires were down. The scenes of destruction—more appalling than a television newscast could ever convey—were laid out before us: Buildings on either side of the highway lacked walls, roofs, windows. What trees were left standing were barren.
“There are no leaves anymore,” said Theade. “It looks like a forest fire went through the island.” Indeed, the Garden Island looked brown, as if doused with a defoliant.
“The price of pakalolo is going way up,” Odo muttered.
As Theade drove through Nawiliwili, he pointed to decimated buildings all around: “The Garden Island Cottages lost their roof. Look, there’s the Eagle distributorship,” he said, pointing to the stripped shell of a warehouse, hundreds of cases of warm beer sitting within. “ That warehouse was just built.”
Over at Kauai’s oldest hotel, The Kauai Inn, manager Jerry Joy—like many people we saw—was drinking beer and surveying what little was left of the property. The hundred-foot-long, two-story hotel—which had just undergone a $2.7 million renovation—had been picked up and moved two feet off its foundation. Large chunks of the roof and portions of the walls had been tom away and the entire building was sagging. Joy’s cottage had fared even worse—it was totaled. Part of the roof was on the sofa, part of it was thirty feet distant in the parking lot. The entire structure was ten feet from its foundation. The back porch was a pile of kindling. A picnic table sat overturned forty feet away. “Wow, J.J.,” Theade and Odo kept repeating, “wow.” By contrast, they had escaped relatively unscathed; Odo had lost his roof, Theade his shack in the backyard.
Joy—like most of Kauai’s residents—seemed shocked and resigned, happy to have made it through the storm alive, unsure about exactly what would—and could—happen next.
He described his night at the old pineapple cannery after Nawiliwili had been evacuated: “We were under a bed in one of the little cubicles. The walls started coming off, panels were blowing through the room. That’s when we started getting concerned,” he deadpanned, cracking open another beer.
Odo said he didn’t realize a storm was en route ’til he listened to a marine forecast, looking to see if the cherry surf of the last couple of days was going to continue. “The insects knew before we did,” he said. “ All the bugs and cockroaches started coming in the house when the wind started to rise.”
Over at the harbor, boats had been tossed about. A sixty-foot ketch named Imagine had been blown out of the water and across the dock—it had come to rest on a forty-foot cabin cruiser and a smaller yacht. Hulls and masts stuck out of the water, indicators of boats below the surface. The water was slick with fuel. Brian O’Brien, a chiropractor from the northern town of Kapaa, surveyed the damage with a beer in one hand, a cigar in the other. “It’s a real blessing,” he said. “ Our economy’s been plummeting, but now we should be getting money for the next eighteen months. This should take us right through the Depression.”
His enthusiasm was not shared by two brothers visiting from Seattle, Alan and Jerry Unis. They’d checked out of their hotel and headed for the airport early Friday morning; when they got there, they were told all flights were cancelled, and they’d better head to a shelter. They, along with their mother and Alan’s wife and children, weathered the storm at Kapaa High School. “It was scary as all get out,” said Jerry. “The wind just kept getting faster and faster. Corrugated metal started pulling off the roof, the walls were vibrating. It was terrifying. The winds blew hard [an estimated 140 mph], then they stopped for about fifteen minutes when the eye passed, and then they hit again. Our adrenaline was rushing for hours.”
The Unis family spent Saturday looking for a place to stay until they could leave the island. But for Kauai’s 50,000 residents, leaving was the last thing on their minds. For George Gonzalez, a doorman at the Hyatt in Poipu, one of the hardest hit areas, Saturday was a day for assessing the damage and looking ahead. “They say the hotel will be closed at least six months,” he said. “ It’s wrecked. The whole oceanfront is gone. The surf was huge, maybe thirty feet—I’ve never seen anything like it. And the wind... we were trying to evacuate people from their rooms, and they couldn’t get out because the wind was so strong—it took four people to open the doors.”
Rose Campos and her twin 5-year old granddaughters were back at the shell of their house, sitting under a makeshift tarp by the side of the road. “Probably, we’ll just pitch a tent and stay here so there’s no looting,” she said. Her granddaughters were chattering about their bird that had flown away in the storm. “ When we were evacuating yesterday, they didn’t really understand what was going on,” said Campos. “ But now they understand what a hurricane is.”
Back at the airport, Gov. Waihee was doing stand-ups for the media; soundbytes audible over the roar of the three C-130s on the tarmac: “damage is extensive,” “really been hit hard,” “worst storm ever.” The National Guard, which had just arrived aboard a Hawaiian Airlines jet, was loading up and moving out—on Roberts Hawaii buses. Inouye, Akaka, Abercrombie and Mink came striding down the runway purposefully. The Jurassic Park crew was still there, still trying to find a way out. Odo and Theade headed home, to fix the roof.