Tag Archives: Hawaii

Podcast on Hawaii Volcano Recovery

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Volcanoes pose a unique challenge for hazard mitigation and post-disaster recovery in the parts of the world where they occur. In the United States, these regions are along the Pacific Rim and in the middle of the ocean itself—in other words, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Hawaii. In Hawaii, an archipelago that grew from volcanic eruptions over millions of years, all active volcanoes are located on the island of Hawai’i, also known as the Big Island because, as Hawai’i County planner Douglas Le notes, the land area of all the other major islands could be fit into this one land mass.

As I have done with previous installments of the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I have been host for the last year and a half, I am providing this brief introduction with a link to the podcast on the APA website. The series is sponsored by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am currently chair.

The subject of this podcast is Hawai’i County’s planning for recovery from the numerous impacts of the 2018 Kilauea volcanic eruption, which buried homes in its path and disrupted life in several subdivisions on a largely rural and agricultural island. The issues involve displacement, social equity, native land rights, environmental quality, and economic recovery, to name a few. Please take time to listen to this 52-minute exchange between me and Douglas Le, disaster recovery officer for the county planning department, and learn more than you may have imagined about how planning can help address this fascinating problem.

Click here to listen.

Jim Schwab

Taking Stock of Recent Disasters

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Photo by Jeff Clevenger

We learn from disasters as we recover from them, but each disaster teaches slightly different things. Sometimes the lessons are significant and historic; in others, one community is learning what others already know or should have learned from their own past events. Some years are relatively quiescent, as 2018 so far seems to be. And some become relentless slogs, like 2017.

Adam Smith, lead scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, noted in a plenary panel in July for the 2018 Natural Hazards Workshop, in Broomfield, Colorado, that the tally for 2017 disasters had exceeded $200 billion. This is more than 40 percent of the tally so far of billion-dollar disasters for the entire decade beginning in 2010. Simply put, with three major hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—striking parts of the southern U.S., followed in short order by some of the most expensive wildfires in California history, it was a wild, taxing year in the world of emergency management.

But our attention fades quickly. Right now, there are no equivalent disasters seizing our attention, but in time there will be. The people who remain painfully aware that recovery is a long, slow process are those directly affected, and even many of them will not fully grasp the ways in which past location choices and patterns of development have brought them to this pass. Many had no choice anyway. Our communities are frequently full of social inequities that compromise the life choices of the poor and disabled. In other cases, the losses inflicted on neighborhoods are the result of hubris on the part of developers, city officials, and homeowners themselves. It does not hurt, approximately one year after these combined events, to look at what we know so far about the recovery following them.

Apparently, the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, agreed that the time was ripe for review because it has released a study, 2017 Hurricanes and Wildfires: Initial Observations on the Federal Response and Key Recovery Challenges. Because of the severity of challenges in Puerto Rico, one may note from the graph below, reproduced from the report, that Hurricane Maria by far entailed the largest federal expenditures.

In spite of that level of effort, Puerto Rico has engendered the most significant criticism of the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Maria struck Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) after Harvey had already drenched and flooded coastal Texas, and Irma had swept through much of Florida.

FEMA teams managing the distribution of water, and meals for hundreds of semi-trucks at an incident Support Base in Seguin, Texas. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio – Aug 29, 2017

The report notes that, as a result, FEMA resources were severely stretched by then, only to have wildfires in California add to the pressure, though the personnel assigned in the last case were small compared to the hurricanes (as is typically the case). Adding to the challenge, Puerto Rico and USVI are offshore and were also poorly prepared for a Category 4 hurricane. Puerto Rico had already suffered years of neglect of crucial infrastructure, was burdened with oppressive debts, and was by far the least prosperous target of the 2017 storms. All this, combined with some incredibly inept public relations from the White House, led to a perfect storm in which nearly 3,000 people have died directly or indirectly as a result of the disaster. To my knowledge, that is a number exceeded in U.S. history only by the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, which killed more than twice as many people. The difference is that, in Puerto Rico, most people died because of blocked transportation, loss of electricity, and similar problems with critical facilities that prevented adequate transportation or medical attention in many isolated communities in the interior of the mountainous island.

Exactly what we learn from Puerto Rico remains to be seen. It is worth noting, in my view, that far more prosperous Hawaii has coped well with admittedly less-challenging disasters in recent years, in large part because state government has practiced response and committed resources to the problem. I say this despite being aware of gaps in Hawaii recovery planning that merit further attention. But if Puerto Rico is a logistical challenge for mainland responders, Hawaii is even more remote but better prepared. The difference in economic circumstances, however, is a dramatic and powerful variable in this comparison, as is Hawaii’s statehood. It is also worth noting that Hawaii is a long chain of islands, and storms (or volcanoes) never affect all at the same time. Effectively, that has always meant that emergency resources in Hawaii have been able to be moved from one or more islands to another that has been hit by a storm. All of Puerto Rico was devastated almost on the same day, with internal transportation, communications, and electric power nearly brought to a standstill, making access to many villages nearly impossible.

If Puerto Rico, followed closely by USVI, is the direst case for long-term recovery, there nonetheless remain serious challenges in Texas, not only in Houston but in dozens of other counties along the Gulf Coast. A recent Washington Post article used the term “Harvey homeless” to describe thousands of Texas families living in whatever parts of their flooded homes they have salvaged while struggling to accumulate the resources to repair the rest. They live with mold, dust, and any other environmental contaminants that endure in essentially unusable parts of their homes. In all, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, at least 175,000 Texas homes were “badly damaged” by Hurricane Harvey, and 80 percent lacked flood insurance, thus relying on much smaller federal disaster payments (averaging $4,203) than flood insurance would have afforded. If there is one powerful lesson in Texas, it concerns public education on the value of flood insurance, particularly in the many areas outside the 100-year floodplain. Unfortunately, much of the public retains the illusion that flood insurance is either unnecessary or unavailable outside the legally defined floodplain. Yet Harvey’s 60 inches of rain in some parts of metropolitan Houston left vast areas beyond the regulatory flood boundaries under water because water does not care about such artificial boundaries. It goes where gravity compels it to go. Moreover, years of loose land-use regulation over the past half-century of rapid growth have expanded the floodplain and put numerous neighborhoods in greater danger than they faced in the past.

Moreover, as John Henneberger, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Housers, noted in his keynote at the Natural Hazards Workshop, Texas does not have a noteworthy history of attention to social equity in disaster recovery. Henneberger called for a new model of disaster recovery in which we seek to use recovery planning to overcome racial and economic inequities, stating that “the legal framework already exists” in federal programs like Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) to “overcome inequalities,” but the rules are not always followed. Thus, his top recommendation for reform was simply to “obey the law” regarding the conditions that apply to state and local use of CDBG-DR funds.

Finally, Bloomberg Business Week chose recently to examine the questions surrounding rebuilding after the California wildfires. With a population already approaching 40 million, the state is under intense pressure to build adequate housing amid rising housing costs. California has repeatedly toughened its building codes in response to wildfire threats but faces a legacy problem of homes built under earlier standards. Not often known outside wildfire research circles is the fact that the average home contains seven to eight times the density of combustible materials as the surrounding forest in the wildland-urban interface. That means that every home that catches fire or explodes is a huge matchstick endangering every other home in its immediate vicinity. When one considers that California is unquestionably the most progressive state in tackling wildfire problems, one understands that the problem of retrofitting older homes built to lower building code standards—or none at all in some other western states—is a lingering and potentially very expensive problem. The dilemma serves to illuminate the value of pre-planning for recovery, learning how to seize the “teachable moment” for reform, to reduce the scope of the problem. The article also notes that, if California is to reduce pressure to build in the forest, its cities must be prepared to allow greater density to relieve the housing crisis in a state where a shortage of affordable housing has yielded a concomitant problem of growing homelessness. And so, we see why urban planning needs both to be holistic in its approach to social problems and guided by wise state policy with supporting resources. We all still have a long way to go.

This blog post can never be long enough to explore all these issues in depth. But in coming weeks and months, I hope to delve into specific issues more deeply, share interviews with individual experts, and explore what needs to be done. I am also watching intently for new books that will shed light on new solutions. One just arrived today. Stay tuned.

Jim Schwab

Prepared for Disaster in Maui

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Paradise is not always paradise. Hawaii generally is vulnerable to a number of potential disasters, including tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, drought, and, in the case of the Big Island, volcanoes (although not of the explosive variety). The entire archipelago is nature’s creation following volcanic uplift in the middle of the ocean over millions of years of geologic time. Humans have occupied these islands for less than a millennium, after their discovery by Polynesian explorers, and Europeans only discovered them in 1776, at the time of the American Revolution, when England’s Captain Cook landed there. We are a mere blip in the evolution of the Hawaiian landscape. It is best we approach such landscapes with humility, for our own sake.

Officials in Maui County, which includes not only the island of Maui but the nearby smaller islands of Molokai, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, seem to realize as much. The best way to convey what they are doing to prepare Maui County for future hazardous events is to let them speak for themselves. In August, at the American Planning Association, we taped a podcast interview with both James Buika, a planner for the county, and Tara Owens, a coastal hazards specialist who has worked with the county on behalf of Hawaii Sea Grant. They explained the county’s planning process to prepare for future disaster recovery needs, including sensitive approaches to native cultural concerns.

Click here to listen to this 23-minute podcast.

Jim Schwab

Hawaii Log (Part 3)

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In the past two installments about Hawaii, I focused on our first two days there, one for me on Kaua’i, the second with my wife and grandson in Honolulu. This third installment will round out the story.

First, the catamaran trip: Since all work and no fun in Hawaii makes even the most diligent planner a dull boy, I wasted no time following suit when my colleague Carolyn Harshman indicated that she intended to spend Sunday afternoon sailing with Maitai Catamaran, her favorite voyaging firm in the islands. She had already spent some time out on the west end of the island at a beach in far better shape than Waikiki where, as she noted, the reef is “pretty beat up” because of overuse and the impact of tourism. Still, this was not a snorkeling voyage. I signed us up before we ever left Chicago, got tickets on the same trip, and we all set sail on Sunday afternoon from a beach near the heart of Waikiki. For 90 minutes, we sailed out toward Diamond Head, took in the sights and the Honolulu skyline, and enjoyed the splash of sea water amid only moderately choppy wave

View of Diamond Head from the Maitai Catamaran.

View of Diamond Head from the Maitai Catamaran.

And what is more fun than sailing on a sunny day?

And what is more fun than sailing on a sunny day?

Small surprise, the crew offers maitais on board, along with other beverages, and my wife and I both imbibed. As the captain noted, “If you drink more, you see more,” which is undoubtedly true for at least some passengers. Midway through the voyage, I chided the young lady who served them for making them “too salty.” “Me?” she exclaimed with mock annoyance. “The waves!” Had I been drinking my maitai with some serious effort instead of merely nursing it, the waves at the midpoint of our excursion might not have had a chance to splash so much sea water into my glass. The taste of what remained gradually evolved to a saltier expression, but it was not entirely bad. Given that I was on the water for a mere 90 minutes and not dependent on such beverages for days, whatever additional thirst the drink engendered could be handled once I was landward again. Once we were, however, Carolyn proceeded to lend her snorkeling goggles to Angel and took him out in the shallow surf to learn to view the world below the surface, which he did with gusto while Jean and I merely rinsed the sand from our feet and enjoyed watching him have fun.I was aware from our schedule—and from the hotel’s shuttle driver—that we would be walking back to the hotel about the same time that the Honolulu Festival parade was making its way down Kalakaua Blvd. Sure enough, we found it within a few blocks of our catamaran site, wave after wave of marchers coming down the street in the late afternoon sun. We found a corner that seemed to be dominated by a long green dragon waiting to be deployed while various other squads made their way eastward.

The green dragon bides his time.

The green dragon bides his time.

Watching a parade in Honolulu is very different in one major respect from watching one anywhere else in the United States. My wife and I had the privilege two years ago of being in Honolulu at the time of the annual Kamehameha Day parade, which celebrates the legacy of the Hawaiian king who, early in the 19th century, became the first to unite the islands into a single nation. Kamehameha, who actually hailed from the “Big Island,” Hawaii, made the decision, after conquering Oahu, to locate his capital where it is today. He started a significant legacy of nation building in the face of European colonialism that, for better or worse, succumbed to U.S. annexation by the end of the same century. By then, he was long gone. What remains is a deeply changed Polynesian culture that nonetheless retains essential elements of its heritage even as it has become a minority in its own land.

Part of the 2012 Kamehameha Day celebration

Part of the 2012 Kamehameha Day celebration

The parade is, for starters, the least Euro-centric of any you will see in the U.S. Hawaii is a deeply polyglot, multicultural society today, and the Honolulu Festival featured units of Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino heritage, as well as Hawaiians, with at most a modicum of European presence. Each group contributes a colorful chapter to the state’s history and culture. Hawaii is today the only state represented by a female Hindu in the U.S. House of Representatives, and virtually no one cares. Hawaii today takes the notion of the great American melting pot to a whole new level. Each parade is a colorful expression of that state of affairs, although the Kamehameha Day parade rightfully emphasizes a great deal more of native Hawaiian heritage, with the royalty of each island having the chance to be recognized as such as they move down the street on horseback.

Another element of the 2012 Kamehameha parade.

Another element of the 2012 Kamehameha parade.

Monday was less exciting for me, except for a small mistake that woke me up far too early. I had agreed to meet my two colleagues in the lobby of the hotel at 6:45 a.m. to walk to the Hawaii Convention Center several blocks away. For some reason I woke before 5 a.m. to use the bathroom. When I returned, I saw what I thought was 5:59 on the hotel clock, and I turned off the alarm on my cell phone and began to get ready, feeling there was no need to let it ring at 6 a.m. and awake my two roommates if I was already up. By what I thought was 6:45, I got off the elevator, looked around the lobby, saw no one, and concluded that I was a little bit late and they had left without me. I began to head in the direction of the convention center but got confused at a T-section at the end of Hobron St., so I called Carolyn, thinking she might already be there, but no answer. I called Gregg, who did answer but said he did not understand why I was asking, as he himself had not even left his house yet. Shocked, I asked, “What time is it?”

Barely 6:00, I learned. I had fooled myself into getting up an hour early. Humbled by my own foolishness, I walked back to the corner of Hobron and Ala Moana Blvd., dragged my gear into the McDonald’s, and ordered an early breakfast before coming back to the hotel, where I met Gavin and Carolyn at the appointed hour. Meanwhile, Carolyn had gotten my message and tried to call back, puzzled by the whole affair until I explained it in person.

I used my standard excuse for such early morning follies. I had not yet had my first cup of coffee. After all, I got that at McDonald’s.

The three of us spent our day at the Hawaii Convention Center, presenting a demonstration version of a planned training workshop at the Pacific Risk Management Ohana (PRiMO) conference, getting feedback, and seeing how things might work. I won’t pursue that here, but one regret is that the convention center, with all the urban setting of Honolulu lying beyond its admittedly gorgeous windows, lacks much in the way of lunchtime attractions for its visitors. Across the street are one Japanese and one Korean restaurant, but the average visitor would be hard pressed to find time for sit-down operations during a convention lunch hour. The alternative is a Subway, which is okay, but hardly unique. As for myself, by the time I was done spending 20 minutes speaking with a consultant who wished to consult me, my time for grabbing anything before we had to commence again was less than 40 minutes. A sandwich from Subway was the only option.

A volunteer team from Manoa explains its preparations for disaster at the PRiMO conference.

A volunteer team from Manoa explains its preparations for disaster at the PRiMO conference.

Perhaps for that reason, after it was over, I insisted on walking our family trio back east down Ala Moana to a place I had noticed earlier, Cheeseburger Waikiki. With a name like that, I can only imagine what some readers may be thinking, and it certainly has some conventional elements, but it is also open air, dimly lit, with a charming semitropical ambience. The menu features some options I might not find in Chicago—like an island cheeseburger, consisting, of course, of a burger topped with Colby Jack cheese, but cooked in barbecue sauce and topped with a succulent fresh layer of pineapple, with, of course, tomato and lettuce as options to top it off or eat separately. No need for catsup on this one, though we could put that on the basket of onion rings we all shared. Frankly, without breaking the bank, this was one of the best cheeseburgers I have had in some time. At the end, we let Angel choose a dessert, which was an ice cream brownie of some sort, and we all shared before we waddled our way back to the hotel for the evening and watched television before falling asleep. After settling for McDonald’s for breakfast and Subway at noon, I was satisfied that I had finally gotten a decent meal for the day. And I was tired.

I set aside all of Tuesday as family time before we left Hawaii on Wednesday. We got a second opportunity to satisfy my culinary curiosity, this time going out for breakfast at an upstairs hole in the wall called Goofy, right on Ala Moana just a few blocks east of the hotel. Apparently a favorite of surfers, it features locally grown food, and the online menu shows a map of the islands and what ingredients come from where. It is not terribly expensive; you can eat breakfast for about $10 to $12 and get the highest quality in the bargain. I chose the salmon and spinach eggs benedict, which include fresh kale and Okinawan purple potatoes, and your choice of wheat or taro muffin. Going extra-local, I chose the taro muffin, made from the starchy root vegetable popular in Hawaii that is also the source of poi. The resulting purple-colored muffins are quite tasty, but so are the purple potatoes, which seem like a cross between regular potatoes and sweet potatoes, both in texture and taste. While the menu does not sport calorie and vitamin counts, my guess is that my $14 choice was pretty high on the nutrition scale in addition to being one of the more interesting I have had in some time, topped off with more than one coffee refill. I should note that Hawaiian coffee, in my experience, is much smoother and less acidic than many other varieties. I brought home a bag of both Kona and Hanalei Roasters, the latter acquired during the Friday trip to Kaua’i.

Jean had wanted to schedule a snorkeling tour and found one for Tuesday that left from behind the Sheraton Waikiki, which sports a rather gorgeous open-air hallway to the beach, which we traversed, although, having not had sense to shop elsewhere earlier, I raced back to acquire an overpriced cap to protect my head from the sun aboard the boat. Out we pranced, when the hour came, through the hot sand to the boat to hop aboard another catamaran, this time with the express purpose of climbing out on the open water. We were told to expect to sightings of sea turtles, and we were not disappointed, although it took a while. Our snorkeling site was over what we were told was a turtle “cleansing station,” but frankly, I am not sure what was down there other than water. If there was a reef, it was truly too beaten up, as Carolyn suggested, to be visible. If there were turtles, I didn’t see them.

The skyline of Honolulu from our catamaran.

The skyline of Honolulu from our catamaran.

I admit to a major handicap in this respect. Those who have read my inaugural blog posting from two years ago know that I am highly dependent on my glasses for sight. There are places that sell or rent “prescription goggles,” meaning those that fit over eyeglasses, but this boat was not so equipped. I could only leave my glasses off in the pockets of my shorts, don my goggles with no visual aids, and dive to see what I could. While I enjoyed the swim, if there was something to see, I did not see it. In the summer of 2002, however, I had done the same thing in the Caribbean off the coast of the Dominican Republic and saw an unmistakably colorful reef, so I have my doubts. Moreover, neither Jean nor Angel raved about any colorful reefs from their own swimming, though they were somewhat less adventurous than I, even with our floating “noodles” in place, in joining the larger crowd from the boat on the open water. I wonder.

Angel and Jean aboard for snorkeling on our last full day in Hawaii.

Angel and Jean aboard for snorkeling on our last full day in Hawaii.

Eventually, after about half an hour of flotation in the open sea, we all climbed back aboard the boat for more sightseeing. Several times we were pointed to whales popping out of the ocean—I don’t believe any were actually breaching—and turned our heads in one direction or another to see them. Periodically, turtles surfaced as well. Because of restrictions that require tour boats to maintain safe distances from these species, the view was always from some distance, which is entirely appropriate. The whales are well aware we are there, and vice versa, and zoom lenses were invented for a purpose. In due course, we concluded our trip, came ashore, and walked back to our hotel for the final time before enjoying dinner around the corner at a convenient Red Lobster.

Ahoy! A whale in the distance.

Ahoy! A whale in the distance.

But not before taking an unplanned detour into the free-admission U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii, which sits on Kalia Road along the beach in a building saved from the wrecking ball. Its exhibits, in an aging but sturdy facility, begin with the military history of native Hawaii, through the period of Kamehameha as he adapted European weapons for his conquest of other islands to unify Hawaii, through annexation and the Spanish-American conflict, which involved some major action in the Pacific by which America acquired the Philippines and Guam, into World War I, and finally to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the conflict with Japan that followed. While I would have preferred to see much more substance concerning the politically touchy subject of just how the U.S. came to acquire Hawaii, something I addressed briefly last June in my discussion of the legacy of Ray Bradbury, I nonetheless appreciated much of the rest of the effort to display the more recent history.

The U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii

The U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii

Hawaii was clearly a strategic location in World War II, and suffered for it. What my wife and I found particularly moving, however, was a video tribute to the Nisei soldiers, those second-generation Japanese-American young men born in the U.S., who fought in that war in Europe. The video details the saga of the “404” regiment that liberated not only Bruyeres in France but the concentration camp at Dachau. The interviews, especially those of Holocaust survivors who encountered these remarkable soldiers, brought tears to my eyes. One Jewish lady interviewed for the film, a teenager at the time the camp was freed, remembers one of these soldiers simply saying to her, “From my God to your God, you’re liberated.”  This liberation of Dachau by the Nisei troops was a new piece of history for me, something of which I had been previously blissfully unaware. It reminded us of just how much American history remains hidden from most of us, but for such documentary efforts.

At that point, we were satisfied with our visit, and our dinner was almost anticlimactic. We retired early for our departure the next morning on a 6:25 a.m. flight from Honolulu International Airport, eventually arriving on a delayed flight from San Francisco at Chicago’s O’Hare at midnight—in a city still lightly covered with snow.

Jim Schwab

 

Hawaii Log (Part 1)

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Early in 2008, after I learned that I would be offered a three-week visiting fellowship by the Centre for Advanced Engineering in New Zealand (CAENZ), colleagues and friends had a tendency to ask why that country was so interested in my expertise in planning for natural hazards. I was bemused by the question every time. “Have you watched Lord of the Rings?” I would ask. Because the movie trilogy was so popular, the answer was “yes” about 95 percent of the time. I would then follow by asking, “You realize those movies were filmed in New Zealand?” Most of the time, people were well aware of this. “Think about that landscape in the movies,” I would advise. “The logic will come to you.”

Those mountains, the volcanic craters, the rugged hills—they had the makings of many natural hazards, including landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and avalanches, to say nothing of New Zealand’s flash floods and ocean storms, including the occasional cyclone. Throw in a few orcs and dark riders, and you have a hell of a script.

People have asked fewer questions about my three trips in the last four years to Hawaii, perhaps because it is more familiar as part of the U.S. They are aware of its volcanoes, may have read about tsunamis, but still . . . . it is paradise, isn’t it? Well, in a sense, but that is what I thought of New Zealand, as well. I couldn’t believe someone was paying me to come there, even though I was very much aware of doing some very real work: seven lectures and seminars in three weeks, as well as attending other events and producing a white paper for CAENZ before I left. It would have been less of a paradise if I had been in Christchurch during the 2010-11 earthquakes. Just as Hawaii was less of a paradise during Hurricane Iniki in 1992.

My most recent visit to Hawaii ended just a week ago, on March 12. I was there as one of three subcontractors working on developing a new training course for the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center (NDPTC) at the University of Hawaii (UH), the only one of seven such centers in the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium specifically devoted to natural hazards rather than terrorism and other human-caused events. The center has recently added disaster recovery to a previous focus on disaster response. Two years ago in June, I taught a three-hour seminar for the UH planning program’s Summer Disaster Institute, focusing on the theory of disaster recovery. The center is led by an urban planning professor, Karl Kim, who is himself a whirlwind of activity and the person who initially created the center. Over the last two to three years, Karl and I have built a significant working relationship between NDPTC and the American Planning Association, where I manage the Hazards Planning Research Center. This is different from the New Zealand relationship in one important way: NDPTC aims to provide training throughout the United States, whereas CAENZ was specifically interested in applying my expertise to hazards policy in New Zealand.

This article has no central purpose. I kept trying to think of one, but decided it would be more fun just to detail the trip itself, in part because my wife tagged along, and she brought with us our 10-year-old grandson, Angel, who skipped a few days of school with the blessing of a principal who was wisely convinced that he might learn more on the trip than he ordinarily would in school. Angel is a very inquisitive kid. He has read most of the I Survived books, in which characters somehow survive harrowing events in world history, like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Hurricane Katrina, the bombing of the World Trade Center, and, yes, Pearl Harbor. Now Pearl Harbor, at least, could become a real place, with a real story to tell, and become more than historical fiction.

Thus, we had a family trio making a trip that for me was largely work-oriented, but learning- and play-oriented for my wife and grandson. We all woke early on March 6, trudging through the curbside snow into a waiting taxi at 3:45 a.m., to go to O’Hare International Airport, catch a flight to San Francisco, get a quick lunch between flights, then catch a second flight to Honolulu, landing at about 3 p.m. with our bodies feeling like 7 p.m. (That difference would grow to five hours over the weekend, as most of the U.S. switched to Daylight Savings Time, but not Hawaii.) By 5 p.m., after getting baggage and a rental car, we were at our hotel, checking in and unpacking. An hour later, we were looking for an early dinner so that I could rise again at 5 a.m. for a flight to Kaua’i. Within the same block that housed the Hawaii Prince Hotel Waikiki, we quickly found Outback. Good enough, no need to search farther, I said. Outback, a chain, is what it is, but for a chain, it serves pretty respectable food. I was satisfied with my sirloin and lobster combo, and by 9 p.m. (1 a.m. where we started the day), we were all sound asleep.

Early Friday morning, the three of us working with NDPTC—myself, Gavin Smith of the University of North Carolina’s Coastal Hazards Center, and Carolyn Harshman, a San Diego consultant and president of Emergency Planning Consultants—drove in a rental car back to Honolulu International Airport for a half-hour flight on Hawaiian Airlines to Lihu’e, on Kaua’i, the farthest west of the main islands. Kaua’i was the target of Hurricane Iniki in 1992, and I had read some after-action reports of the relief operations on the flights from Chicago.

We had a full day ahead of us. First, the only significant roads in Kauai circle the perimeter of most of the island, with the interior dominated by lush mountains. All the towns are squeezed into a narrow coastline, making traffic a slow-moving nightmare, even though much of the coastal scenery is drop-dead gorgeous. Second, I immediately noticed that one thing I had been told was true: the island has a large number of feral chickens. They were wandering the parking lot of the county administration building when we arrived. Before Iniki, they were farm chickens in coops, but the hurricane sprung their cages, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. My wife, when I told her of this on the way to Hawaii, asked why people did not go out and recapture them. One may as well ask why no one has trapped all the snakes in the Everglades. One look at the scenery would dissuade anyone from such a mad scheme, aside from the fact that the return of value on the effort involved would be pitifully small. The chickens are now wild for all time, just like the nutria that escaped into the Louisiana bayou country nearly a century ago.

What? You thought I was kidding?

What? You thought I was kidding?

But my wife has not seen Kaua’i. She can be excused for an innocent question.

Well, no, I wasn't.

Well, no, I wasn’t.

Our trip to the North Shore of Kaua’i put us in touch with a remarkably articulate advocate for community involvement in disaster recovery. Maka’ala Ka’aumoana speaks to the value of long-term residents who understand the imperatives of survival in a shoreline community that can be imperiled by storms such as Hurricane Iniki, and she has seen the slow erosion of such knowledge and skills as Hanalei has become an increasingly transitory, visitor-oriented community. Still, she argues forcefully for “community as the convener” when all the county, state, and federal agencies show up to help after a disaster. Community is tricky business in Hawaii, which does not have the kind of decentralized small town governance of most mainland states. There are only four counties, each of which encompasses one major island and sometimes nearby smaller islands. A mayor is mayor of the entire island, not just of, say, Hilo or Honolulu. And so, even at the level of a village like Hanalei, the official governance mechanisms still reside with the county. Whether that is good or bad, or how it came about, is beside the point here. The reality for Maka’ala is that governing authority resides elsewhere, but the moral and civic authority of the community still resides with the people in Hanalei. They have plans, and they want them honored. At the same time, she gently challenges the values of some newcomers and visitors who seem to want all the amenities they left behind somewhere else. “If you did not come here to slow down,” she says she asks them, “why did you come here at all?” Hanalei, after all, has the look and feel of a town at the end of the road, which it almost is. Look closely at a map of Kaua’i, and you will notice that Route 56 goes only a few miles further west along the coast before ending at Ha’ena. The coast gets pretty rugged after that.

The view from in back of Maka'ala's office. In case I didn't mention it, "Jurassic Park" was filmed on Kaua'i, as was some of "Gilligan's Island."
The view from in back of Maka’ala’s office. In case I didn’t mention it, “Jurassic Park” was filmed on Kaua’i, as was some of “Gilligan’s Island.”

It is hard to imagine how one evacuates people on Kaua’i amid the traffic congestion that dominates the main roads on a daily basis, let alone in a crisis. We returned to Lihu’e, and it took nearly half the afternoon to do it. Volcanic islands tend to produce gorgeous but challenging terrain. We had the opportunity to hear from utility executives, county emergency management officials, and other citizens about the issues connected with protecting such a vulnerable population. Unlike the mainland, there is no larger grid, for instance, to provide backup power. That calls for a different kind of resilience than the rest of us are used to. There is a great deal to learn in a place like Kaua’i, but one must be prepared to listen. By the time we flew back to Honolulu in the evening, I think we all had learned a great deal indeed, and owed a debt of gratitude to some of the county officials who had arranged these conversations for us.

Meanwhile, my wife had taken our grandson to Pearl Harbor, where he saw the U.S.S. Arizona memorial and toured the U.S.S. Missouri, which hosted the signing ceremony for the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. My next posting will discuss our time on Oahu.

 

Jim Schwab