Severe storms a wake up call
The heartbreaking images and stories coming out of hurricane-ravaged Florida are stark reminders of how vulnerable we are out here in the middle of the Pacific.
Someday, we could the ones on TV sifting through the rubble of our shattered homes.
Packing 155-mph winds, Hurricane Ian made landfall near Fort Meyers as a Category 4 storm teetering on the edge of Category 5, the highest possible. Its massive storm surge, howling winds and record flooding carved a 400-mile-wide swath of devastation across the state. Officials say it will take years, if not decades, to rebuild what has been lost.
A similar wakeup call was sounded two weeks prior, and a lot closer to home, when Typhoon Merbok pounded the northwestern coast of Alaska. Though this storm received far less press, it severely impacted the far-flung communities in its path.
We know someone in the U.S. Coast Guard who was deployed to Nome as part of the response. He describes very sobering scenes in the remote native villages where locals face food shortages, lost roads, destroyed facilities and uncertain futures due to rising seas and intensifying storms. When asked what they most needed, money and machinery topped the natives’ lists.
This week on Maui, a summer’s worth of big south swells eroded the Kaanapali shoreline enough to topple about a dozen tall coconut palms and a long stretch of concrete beach walk fronting the Kaanapali Alii. Down the coast, Maui County’s Department of Public Works unveiled options for dealing with erosion at Kaopala Bay that include turning Lower Honoapiilani Road into a cul-de-sac.
Maui’s fallen palms and pummeled sidewalk pale in comparison to the storm damage suffered in Florida and Alaska, but they are part of a disturbing trend. Shoreline erosion and rising seas already threaten some of our island roads, parks, homes, condos, churches and cemeteries. It is only expected to get worse.
Mitigation efforts can buy time for endangered buildings like the Hololani condominium in Kahana and Paia Mantokuji Soto Zen Mission on the North Shore, but a phrase we’re going to hear a lot in the future is “managed retreat.”
Moving parks inland is one thing. Telling a neighborhood full of condo owners they are on the hook for tearing down their own buildings is quite another. The economic impacts will be extreme, not only for those directly invested, but for coastal property owners around the state. Tax revenues will take a hit just as infrastructure costs soar.
We expect mitigation efforts to be employed until they either no longer work or are found to be doing more harm than good. The breaking points for Maui’s coastal roads and buildings could come gradually, or arrive with a knockout punch from a storm like Hurricane Ian.