House Standing Committee on Public Safety

Good afternoon. Convening, the committee on public safety, today is Monday '6, 02:00pm. Are we okay? Yep. We're good.

Alright. Little technical difficulties there. 02:00PM, we are here in Conference Room 325, on the very first day of conference. So I really wanna, send my thanks and appreciation to all of the individuals who have prepared for this informational briefing before this public safety committee. Conference is, of course, a crazy time, but this is also an important matter that has, really, rocked our communities over the last month or so.

So the purpose of this informational briefing is to receive an overview and update from state agencies and thank you to the city and county of Honolulu for showing up regarding the response to the recent Kona low events as well as to learn the steps these agencies are planning to take to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of future extreme weather systems. Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more of these, and we are not even yet in hurricane season.

So I felt that it was important given the interest in what's happened, in the devastation that has actually occurred statewide that that this is an important briefing even in the midst of conference to do. So I really wanna show appreciation to my colleagues. We have members of the public safety committee here, but as is custom of this house and just generally of committees, committees are allowed to have representatives, also outside of the committee.

So I would like everyone to introduce themselves and we'll start to our far right with representative Shimizu, if you could introduce yourself, your district, and then just pull them up.

Hi. Shimizu, District 32, Moanalua, Red Hill, Lower IAL, Pearl Ridge, Aloha Stadium, Foster Village area.

Thank you for being here.

Okay. Kim Coco, Iwamoto, District 25, Ala Maunakakau in Downtown Honolulu.

Representative Amy Perruso. I first represent from Waipio Acres out to Ka'ena Point.

Aloha. Mahina PoePoe, District 13.

So to our guests, as you can see, we have a statewide presence here. We have communities statewide that were affected by the, the Kona low storms, and that's why, you know, that that's another reason why, this, briefing is so important as we head into the hurricane season. So on that note, I have, on our agenda the list, and I wanted to give, administrator Burrows, the start of this, as, administrator of HIEMA.

With understanding that you'll probably get kind of an overview of what happened, and then we would go and proceed to the, National Weather Services that was part of kind of understanding for us what was the situation on where this our agencies had as we were moving through these storm systems. And then, of course, all of the agencies.

And I know general Logan, you typically are up first, so I apologize, but I really wanted to have this overview and then we can dive more deeply into each of the department's respective areas of of responsibility. And so that that's why this is structured delays. And then we'll wrap up with, also, some insights from the city and county of Honolulu, which, of course, experienced, some very severe damages as as we've seen over the last, oh, call. So I'm gonna share Veros off to you first.

Alright. Thank you, Chair, committee members. Thank you for allowing us this time. So the event really started in early March when the National Weather Service indicated that there's something tracking. We start our coordination calls on the March 9.

So for us, in emergency management, the event started on September where we bring all the key players onto a state call with the governor and with the National Weather Service, and we get updates. And we did we do that daily. We started on the ninth, like I said. As as the event progresses, we evaluate what the National Weather Service is saying. Our calling partners are on there, and they also will share what their posture is and what kind of needs they have, from the county.

All our state agencies are present, on that on that call. So all our ESFs are activated. Then if you recall on the March 12, the governor does have a press conference with general Logan and with the superintendent, and they're looking at the impact of that Kona law one. And we close schools, and we close the state on that Friday. We feel the impact.

We're going to a response phase. And then by Monday, the state kinda moves into this rapid assessment phase. And we thought we'd get this good period to do a good assessment. Unfortunately, National Weather Service had other plans for us. So we're going to a Honolulu two.

And I think with both Konolos, we anticipated some impacts and some major impacts, but the timing was a little off for us and and our understanding on where it was gonna impact and and the timing of it. So it was a weather event that we couldn't really target the exact times and places for impact. But we did anticipate having major impacts for the state. We we are, for the most part, in a flash flood warning or watch.

We go into a watch for the entire state, and then that particular time is going to a a warning.

So that's kind of the overview on on the I know the National Weather Service will speak, more details on the weather system. But from the Haima perspective, you know, we look at every event as an opportunity to see what worked for us and what didn't. So there were there were things that worked for us. Having the state agencies on the call, the state agencies, for example, in a response, Dofa wasn't asked. They activated and they moved to the sounds of the gun.

DOT, the same thing. DLE and and, of course, our partners with the National Guard stood up, very proactive. Our partners with the 25th and Schofield Barracks, the US Army, Garrison, They postured themselves to support the state. Normally, you won't see that kind of posturing, from an active duty somewhere, but in Hawaii, very much so, leading forward. In fact, having a a battalion, prepared to support the state.

And we use them, twice in the one and then again in April when we asked for their assistance. One of the things that was very impressive from Honeywell's perspective was the tactical cooperation with our first responders. When we when we look across the state with the county first responders linking up with our national guard assets, linking up with our state assets At the tactical level, there's great work happening.

And we get we understand that in some areas, they don't see that because we only have so much tactical forces to go. And that's my my next point of neighbors helping neighbors.

That's the strength of our state is neighbors stepping up and helping neighbors. So for the past three years, we've been pushing HR. We gotta strengthen our communities. We gotta get them to understand that we don't have enough assets for every single neighborhood, for every single event. So we gotta strengthen them.

Some of the things that we'd like to improve, one, our notification system. We do have iPAAS. Right? The FEMA iPAAS. So we we get the alert wireless, and we can put it on TV and radio.

What we are exploring is a statewide system with Everbridge. So with Honolulu County coming online with HNL Alert, which is a Everbridge platform, Hawaii County uses Everbridge. There's a whole slew of partners out there, a private, a hospitals, health industry. There's a lot of banks that are using Everbridge. So we're trying to collect that and have a bigger state umbrella so that our notification can reach more people and and it can be geofenced a little bit better.

And we can from the state to the county to private partners are messaging during emergencies. The other area for improvement for us is our statewide situational awareness across. Instead of looking at, you know, three different sites to find out what level of waters are in this stream and at this reservoir and what's happening with National Weather Service.

Instead of having, you know, six screens, we're looking at how do we combine it so that we're looking at one snapshot that gives, the decision makers, that situation awareness. So we're still working on finding that technology for the state.

One of the lessons learned too as as we watch Guam and CNMI is the FEMA lifelines. The tree that will come up at at the very top for Haniwa will be power, communication, and water. Those three and we see that kind of impact in Saipan where they they lose water, their comms went down, and their their power went down. In fact, Hawaii sent, two representatives and they're in Saipan now. And the very first mission they had was to bring back up their emergency comms.

So they got to they checked that lock. They're slowly bringing power back on, mostly generators, and they're still working the the water issues. Those three will be a priority for Honeywell with the lifelines. I think the other one for us is pre positioning critical state assets across, you know, not just Oahu centric, but across our states. We were talking with the national guard on what can we put on Kauai pre hurricane season.

So those kind of conversations. The last thing for for us from Haima is is the sheltering mission. You know, for within three years, we've been talking about shelters and lack of hurricane shelters. So what what does that mean for the state? In one of the committees, they asked and I said, we don't have enough money to build enough shelters.

There is no way we could. But we can do hunker down spaces. We can find safe spaces that we can we can hunker down, ride that hurricane out, and then come back out and then talk about a shelter. So it's that concerns me, and that's one of the things that keeps me up and, like, is a sheltering so that we have our citizens are safe and they're alive after that hurricane passes.

Because when you look at the impacts of as we watch CMNI, as we watch just Wailua, that was just water.

The hurricane will be that much more water on track, plus storm surge, plus the winds. So it would be very a 100 times more devastating. So where do we put our citizens? And that's one of the challenges that that as a community, we have to we have to answer that before hurricane season. And then, you know, for we did get the presidential debt.

So it's a a disaster 4909. The FEMA team is on ground. In fact, we have the deputy from Region 9. She's with us. She came in today.

So she's sitting at Haima. The team is doing, individual assistance brief with the counties, so that programs, were are are are open, and we're working with our partners for our public assistance.

And we're going hard on the throttle for public assistance to ensure that that our state agencies, our county partners, our nonprofits can take advantage of the FEMA money that's available to rebuild after this incident. And then I'm from day one at Haima, I kept saying the center of gravity is our communities. So when we see our our community step step up and set up a hub, help one another, that's the center of gravity. That's what's gonna keep us in the next disaster.

The challenge that that I have at Haima that I give to my team is, okay, how do we help those communities get better?

How do we train them to run a halt? How do we train them to look at the hazards that they're will be faced with? And that's all I have, Chair.

Okay. Thank you for that kind of overview of the initial timeline. I have one quick clarification. Between the two Kona lows, was there any, like, delay with getting the presidential proclamation or was it just because they they were having so close? Like, in the normal course of time, what what is the time frame in which we get the presidential proclamation?

So Honolulu happened. What what what you gotta do is do a damage assessment. So we rapidly did damage assessment. So we got them out there. The teams are out there.

FEMA was on on the ground with us, so we we tried to jump right into the joint damage assessment. So we tried to accelerate that.

Between the two systems.

Between the two systems. Then the second system hit, then the conversation with National Weather Service, with FEMA is, instead of two events, we'll have one event. And that's that's what we got. Yeah.

So I just wanted to kinda set the stage for that. Now I know that in part of the presentation, we wanted to kinda go over the a review of kind of the heat by damage. Is that appropriate now? Who is gonna take that up? Are we not gonna because could we briefly do that before we we switch into the National Weather Service stuff?

No. I'm seeing no. Okay. Let's let's move into the presentation for the National Weather Service because I think that will help us understand, as I understand from representative Perruso, that one of the things that's happening is that we didn't seem to have good data to know and be able to predict what's what's happening in some communities who are somewhat caught off guard.

And so I guess what the committee or what I was interested in knowing was what was happening, what what is it that we need to know, or or what what could we have known?

Given and I wanna say that, mister Rovander is actually a federal employee. So he's not actually someone who had to come before us. I really wanna thank him for coming to us because I think that the data that we were given was kind of some and it wasn't anything you had control of. It's the weather. Right?

So we wanted to understand, like, what was it that we needed to know, we didn't know, and and what could we know better next time?

Yeah. I'm happy to be here. It's interesting the the the introductions of everybody that was here. A lot of people forget that Weather Service is actually federal because we're located in all the communities where community resource. We all live here.

We all work here. So it's I'm happy when we're it's just assumed we're part of the state. But I guess just going into this, expanding on what James mentioned, I'll go over a little bit about the lead in to these weather systems. The first statewide coordination meeting we had that Monday. We're actually starting to send out some emails beforehand, the week beforehand.

Just get people thinking about it over the weekend. And going into this event, that first quota low, the the the real true large scale weather system, that was one we were pretty confident about. It was well, it was a large weather system. We're confident it was gonna it was going to happen. There was uncertainty in where the impacts might be, where the strong winds set up.

But going into that first events, there is a a fair amount of confidence. I think we were talking about a a wave of rain coming through that first what Wednesday and then rain and wind by that Friday the thirteenth where we end up shutting everything down and then tapering off as it moves through. The second code of law what everybody calls code of law two, even going into that, we we went through we we did briefings.

We stopped the last briefing on, I guess, would be Monday the sixteenth and took a couple days off. And even that afternoon, we sent out another email saying, hey, keep an eye out for this weekend.

There's something coming, but it's a lot more uncertain. High competence in the first one, extremely lower than normal competence in the second one. And we we James called me on Wednesday, so, okay, when do we start briefings? What started tomorrow?

We started them again Thursday morning, the nineteenth, and then continue them through the next week as well. That what the the first one, we had a lot of rain. That was the big concern was how much rain we're gonna receive over a long period of time. And we didn't have as much impacts with that, but one thing it did do was set the stage for the second one. It had a lot of rain, saturated the ground, had a lot of runoff.

And that became an issue with the second one where This was our lesson learned from the event was focusing less on the total rainfall amounts and more on the rates of rainfall because that was what was causing the big problems. How fast the rain fell down for for Thursday night, the nineteenth and the twentieth was we we had a couple rain gauges that had seven inches of rain in an hour or so. And that's hard to even comprehend that much rain.

One of the Mezzonet gauges picked that up and my boss who lives in LA had the same thing with his rain gauge. How did we get 10 inches of rain in four hours?

Most of that was in one. So that's the focus. That was the challenge with that one going into it. So from the large scale, we're looking at from the the briefing standpoints that we provide and the flood watch letting people know, hey, conditions are there for heavy rains, flash flooding. From that, we narrow it down.

Once the rain is focused and going, we issue more very short fuse products. Flood advisories, if it's just heavy rain that could cause nuisance problems or flash flood warnings that are the the the damaging ones when when there's inundation. And that's the other, I guess, communication challenge. The tools that we have with those warnings, emergency alert system that's county based. That's what goes over radio, TV, and activates NOAA weather radios.

And then the smaller targeted wireless emergency alerts that go through FEMA Ipods that are the the ones you get to your cell phone warning flash floods. Five years ago, National Weather Service made a change in the way we activated those Wias Because of, it was more of a concern on the Mainland. I think that they were getting too many flash flood warnings. People were annoyed by them. So they said, okay, we'll put these impact based tags.

There's a base level of flash flood, and then we'll have higher ones, considerable damage or catastrophic damage. And only those ones will activate WIAs. The idea being that it's a base level of flash flood warning, roads that normally flood would flood, but you might not have housing inundations or things like that. But if there's houses being inundated or if there's people being rescued from cars, that would be this considerable and that's what we would notify people about.

From my opinion, I don't think we had an over warning issue here in Hawaii.

And that's something that we discuss a little bit. We'll take that back to our national headquarters. Hey. Maybe we can change this here. I don't know if that's possible or not.

But that's one of those challenges that we've identified as far as a public alert goes because we have a lot of communication from us to elected officials, to decision makers, to emergency managers, notifying with push notifications when we put out products. But we don't have a service like that to the general public. And that's where, like, the gap is. People that go to sleep, we might put out a flash flood warning.

But unless you have a NOAA weather radio that'll turn on and wake you up, you might not hear that until there's already impacts when you get that wireless emergency alert.

So that was one of the big takeaways from our agency from that standpoint.

I'm sorry if I kinda drifted all over the point. Was that enough of an overview for the

Yes. I have one clarification before we start turning to the the others. And I I don't wanna lose this. So the notifications, the short fuse products notifications, the flash floods, that's issued by you and it goes and travels through the HyEMA and then through the counties, or does it go through you to the counties?

It goes from us to everybody.

And then they deploy it as they see fit.

How how yeah. Yep. It goes out to the public. It goes out to any decision makers. I think Everbridge gets a direct feed from us and can push that out to their internal notification systems.

So whoever signs up for that can get that. It's

But in this instance, one, because you folks weren't looking at rates and you're focusing on on more volume that one, the data that was going out wasn't necessarily reflecting potential hazards in communities.

It is but it it sorry. I'm trying to think of how to rephrase that. It was that was the message from the briefings that we were giving. So when we're looking at preparing for this event, we're talking about talking with people the day before, we're talking these broad numbers. Once we get to the event unfolding, when we put out flash flood warnings, it's what we're seeing on radar right then.

We're seeing a cluster of thunderstorms offshore moving in. We're putting out that warning. As we see it. So it's not so much the that I when I mentioned the the the broad brush versus the the rates, that was more the messaging coming from our office leading up to the event as to what the the house we get.

So next time around, you guys will actually be looking more at rates, especially if we have back to back systems that are coming so closely. Yep. Okay.

It is one of those tools that this year, we we we started doing more graphical briefings and what can we use for an image? Let's use a rainfall forecast. Maybe that's not the best thing to use. So now we how the the question for us is how do we develop those images? And what does it mean?

Is it, hey, there's a 40% chance of forage for our influence. Is that useful? So that's that's sort of the conversations that we're having now.

Quick one more question, and then I I then I wanna shift to what how the agencies are responding. And the question is because you said that and I just wanna pick up on it. The communication goes from you to the group as a whole, state and county of agencies, and then they deploy. Now from our again, I've only been on the public safety committee and most of the peers here.

I've only been on the public safety committee for two years. The WIA system is actually the intersection between government and also public broadcasting. Is that correct? Is that is my understanding of that correct?

So the there there's two different interfaces. One from the for commercial commercial for for broadcast TV and radio is emergency alert system. So that's yes. That's the the e e and the crawls on the TV. Those are based on county. So it'd be for the entire county, all of Kauai County, all of Maui County for flash flooding on Molokai.

So the whole county get those alerts. With the way our communications are set up here, if you're looking at TV, all of our TV stations broadcast statewide. So they'll you'll also see crawls in the TV for anything in the state. It's the wireless emergency alerts that you get on the cell phones that are targeted just for the location of that phone.

Okay. That and that's that's what you mean by we as. Yep. Okay.

So thank you for this clarification and thank you for indulgence. One more question on this. So in this system of the two Kona lows, was our communication systems on broadcasting and WIA's working properly? And and maybe as we go along, we can kind of address that question because I don't know that from the experience of community that it necessarily was. I don't know.

But that so and we might have been getting some feedback that that that maybe it wasn't actually working, but I don't know again. I think on our end, as the system was moving, all of, like, legislators have been trained, tell your communities, get on to, in in our case, h and l or, you know, and and get on and, like, watch and watch the TVs, and everyone's like, no.

I think we actually have a very good trained population that watches when when we have, like, these kinds of alerts. So my assumption is that that it was going well, but I don't know if it was actually deployed really really well. So maybe we can take up that question as we go along. So on

that note, anything else? Does anyone wanna ask me follow-up questions about the weather, the weather forecasting, about how they would be providing us our our our state departments the best information that they could have? Alright. No other questions? We can turn it over now back to the state agencies, and I guess maybe we should start with a response from DOD.

Sure, chair.

Hey, chair Balani, vice chair Yamamoto, and all the committee members, thank you for your time here. I know it's a it's a very important time in the legislative calendar. I'm I'm Major General Logan. I'm the adjutant general for the State of Hawaii Department of Defense, aloha. The following informational briefing provides an overview on the department's response and recovery support to the recent colonial storms and the April severe weather events.

The primary mission of the State of Hawaii Department of Defense is to enable a safe, secure, and thriving state and nation. We accomplish this by being trusted, ready, and responsive. In preparation for the initial Kono low storms based on forecast from the National Weather Service, governor Green issued a state emergency proclamation on 03/09/2026.

This enabled my department to activate members of the Hawaii National Guard in all four counties and to have them prepositioned to respond to flooding caused by heavy rains and damage caused by high winds. Examples of how these forces were deployed are high water vehicle teams operating vehicles with the capacity to forward flood depths of up to three feet to conduct either victim evacuation or transport first responder personnel to the affected areas.

We found this capability was best partnered with county fire department personnel and facilities to aid in their responsiveness. These same vehicles were subsequently used for initial degree clearance operations, which enables what we call flexible domestic response options. Based on vulnerabilities reported by the DLNR dam safety experts, we placed our personnel in positions to physically monitor water levels at various reservoirs and dams throughout the state.

Some were static and were posted there, either when it wasn't manned by the dam owners or some were mobile because they were in close proximity, and they could back up to whatever electronic, warning systems or my measuring systems were there. We provided National Guard liaison officers or LNOs in all four county emergency operation centers to assist in planning and provide expertise on our capabilities.

This also enables us to anticipate community needs by being present as the situation developed. And ultimately, that leads to our vision statement, which is which is to be responsive. We participated and helped stand up the Joint Information Center, or CHIC, to provide timely information and accurate information out to the community. We also activated military aircraft crews to provide a search and rescue and initial assessment capability. Here's just a few of the statistics to date of of of what we were able to accomplish.

So we evacuated with our helicopters, 47 persons and two dogs from Oahu's West Coast during the Colombo Storm. They run a camping trip at Our Lady Of Keaau, and they had become isolated, so we were able to bring them to safety. We ground evacuated between all three storms, a total of 91 personnel and one dog from various locations throughout the state. Approximately 10,509 89 gallons of potable water were distributed, servicing approximately six 766 persons.

This mission is ongoing and is still going today in the Otaki and Waialua mill camp areas.

We completed debris clearance operations from 164 homes, resulting in the removal of approximately 3,332 cubic yards of mud and debris. And we filled and distributed approximately 4,420 sandbags. It is unknown how much further damage this prevented during the during this month's severe weather events, but they were just distributed. I currently have personnel activated to assist in water distribution and recovery operations into June if necessary, and can approach the governor to see if he can extend the emergency proclamation for a more extended period.

Overall, I'm extremely proud of the dedicated soldiers and airmen on the Hawaii National Guard who volunteered to support the state and their communities in time of need.

I wanna thank you all for the opportunity. Like I said, I know it's a very intense time for the for the for the legislative session. And and thank you all for what you do for our state.

I would say that one of the more positive things that occurred is I got to see firsthand the collaboration and cooperation between the state, the governor, myself, the administrator, all the four counties to include the city and County Of Honolulu and other state departments in order to aid in decision making like closure of schools or state offices so we could give consensus amongst the other mayors and stuff, and also to to to to create what we would call unity of effort throughout the community.

We we consider this a whole of government approach.

Administrator Barrows did mention the cooperation with the active army forces that are up at Schofield Barracks. Major general Jay Bartholomew's was the is the division commander, and he he calls me a lot during these events to see how he can posture. And they had that that that battalion that was ready as a quick reaction force to be able to to to deploy if necessary.

What I would also wanna close out with this, we do have some tools that people can use if they if they are looking for help. Our ready.hawaii.gov, website links to recovery resources, department of health information on post flood health concerns, and also brown water advisors.

There's a telephone number 211 or you can visit www.auw211.org for resources like housing, food, clothing, supplies, transportation, power charging, and more. That service is provided by the Aloha United Way to connect people with over 4,000 local resources. And the 211 helpline is available statewide, so it's not just on this island alone. So, again, thank you for your time, and we're we're all here available for any questions that you might have.

I think we can proceed more quickly, and I won't interrupt with any questions. So I believe director Sniffin, you're up next from your DOT perspective.

Sounds good. Yeah. The presentation.

Is the presentation ready? Alright.

Thank you so much. Hello. It's Sniffin with Hoi DOT. Just to highlight some of the the, proofs that we've done during the process. Next slide, please.

So the first column, the the impacts were were several fold. We we saw flooding throughout in different areas. You'll see different examples in different areas of flooding in particular. On the far on the second the third to the right, that's the Khalid off ramp from H 1 going up to up to the Windward side. That area flooded because a culvert in that area collects up four different city drains into one location.

All thing blew out. So we had to reconstruct that. We made sure we did we did it as fast as possible just in in advance of the second corona low coming through. Last thing we wanted to do is let's have to re reset this whole area during that time. But you also see on the left side, there are small flooding areas, areas of pavement instability that we found that we had to address.

First on the far right side, stream in areas where Otaki Camp, those types of areas that we had the normal at that time, the normal flooding that you'd normally see in a large storm event. So we have to address all those pieces prior to the the next storm closure. Next slide, please. But we had rough fallen slopes slope issues. We saw on the side on the left, you'll see soil slopes like that.

You where we have weathered rock formations. All of our system when it was built initially was was in areas of steep slopes with good rock formations. Over the years since the sixties, we saw a lot of erosion of those slopes and a lot of degradation of those slopes. And we're in areas where we have steep slopes next to most of our roads now.

We're making sure that we addressed we've addressed all of those during the midterm condition to clean up the slopes, put up slope back and to make sure we can address them.

The second slide is Kwaemba Highway going through Kipapa Gulch. We we pulled out other rocks and reset that fencing. On the right side, you see the Waimea, the nine foot boulder on the right side that we have to have to reset. Make sure that we protected it. It came down from a cave.

So our our contractor was very cognizant about not damaging their rock. Law. Took it to the one man preserve to make sure we take care of it. But issues like this that we have to address throughout these pieces. Next slide, please.

On top of the the rains, whenever we have winds, especially corner winds, coming from a direction where these trees and poles don't normally get get impacted, you see a lot more tree falls. And not just during the storm events, but a couple days afterwards. So during the event, you'll see we're we're closing on roadways or short terms, making sure we yank all these things out, put them on the side.

After the event was done, we're chasing areas where we would see trees coming down in different portions, and we tried to cut them prior to them coming down during those time frames. So all of these are are are normal impacts that we'd see in large storm events.

And then we had three, all in succession. So our crews were were burning throughout. We made sure that our contractors got involved in addressing these situations. And not just in the short term, not just for the the storm itself, but to make sure we we put in improvements for the mid and long term. Next slide, please.

Well, we saw near coastal erosion as well. So Kalaniyaoole Highway on the left side took out a portion of the roadway over there. We had to reconstruct that and farm it with the carbon boulder fill, something that's that minimizes reflection into the water. On the right side, that's tracking highway near Kiau Beach. That portion of the roadway just got taken out.

When we see the way water up above was directed into the area, I'm not gonna reconstruct that portion. If I reconstruct it, it's gonna get eaten up again. So we'll leave that portion out. Well, we've cleared it to make sure it's a one lane road through that area, and we set up yield signs on both sides just to make sure that everybody understands how to use it from now on. Next slide, please.

So throughout these three storms, our normal approach is to make sure we get to all the streams, ditches, anything that's on the state system to clear them out to give as much capacity as possible before the storms. Now the weakness of our approach is my jurisdiction is that bridge, period. Nothing upstream, nothing downstream. That's where my jurisdiction starts and ends. So we hit all those areas.

My pitches are the ones that run parallel and perpendicular to the state system in within this in the DOT right of way, period. That's all I did in the past. These storms change things tremendously. So this is what we did prior to each of the different storm events. Any of the debris that came down, we started clearing them up to make sure we could get water through.

We didn't go upstream to start clearing out vegetation or other muck that had built up over time because my jurisdiction is that bridge itself. Next slide, please. Some of the slope mitigations that we had taken care of. You saw Waimea Bay on the left side. It's a shotcrete wall anchored with anchored with the anchor 60 foot anchors into the slope.

Had we not done that on the first night, we would have lost that whole that whole road. In that area, we saw that move about two inches, during this time frame. There's a 16 inch water main that runs through that slope. If it moved four inches and broke that water main, the whole slope is gone. So good thing we our contractors were available, get out there as quickly as possible.

Our designers got out there and make sure that we put an improvement in place that we could do it right. The center one the center one is the Pali Elm on Maui. We had to scale that slope immediately and reset some of the rock streaking over there. And on the right side, I forgot Kapuna on the stream. That area where Taka Camp got overrun by the flooding.

And on the second Kona, though, Hauona Street and everything else got got flooded as well. Next slide, please. So mid term solutions for us. We gotta be we, the state and counties, gotta be more active in making sure all of our streams are maintained. I think over time and and this is I'm not saying this is anybody's fault.

Because if you look at the stream jurisdictions throughout the state, they're extremely complex. Some of them are owned by the city. Some of them are owned by a state. Some are owned co owned by private ownership. So very difficult sometimes for state agents to say, I will put money into this because they might be helping a private interest.

Based on what we saw, these are the streams that we're prioritizing right now to just clear the whole thing from the source down to the outbound. Making sure that these are no longer gonna be issues into the future. It's gonna be money though. I mean, there's gonna have to be a bunch of money put into this. A Kakuna stream itself, probably 1 and a half million that we're gonna put into that to make sure Wataka camping, anything down below doesn't get flooded anymore.

Some of these streams on the North Shore coming from the wet sides of the mountain channels a lot of water regularly. So making sure that these stay open. And this is and not just the vegetation that might fall into it. Not just the vegetation that people cut from their backyards and throw into the stream, but also all that debris that was washed off from the mountain in the past that built up in the stream over time that limits the capacity in those areas.

All of that stuff gotta be dredged first, cleared and reset.

And second, there's gotta be responsibilities on who actually takes care of it in the long term. And this is my opinion. If we leave this up to a private entity to do, I don't know what gets done. In the past, when plantations ran the streams and ditches, it was water was super important to them. They wanted to make sure that they they reserved every drop for their crops.

Now when when these plantation era areas were sold to to separate private owners, those ditches are now just impediments. Those are areas where they cannot use that land, so you can see some of them throwing rubbish in those ditches to fill them up so they can use them. So you'll see in different areas, especially when storms come through, water is discontinuous. It's supposed to be directed into different ditches that are along the air. So it's gonna find its own way across the land.

And that's where you'll see different in different spots. Throughout our state, just on the roadway system, we see areas flooding that we never seen flood before. Kamala Flat, something on is on. We never seen flooding out there before. Now that area floods consistently because of changes on the Mauka side.

So part of this is the streams. Part of this is making sure that we understand the grading that's occurring in areas that affect our our segment infrastructures.

Wait. Before you move on, just because I know that people are gonna be interested in this slide deck, and I just wanna confirm on the, priority streams that you're looking to clear and have, like, an all county state approach cooperation in the midterm kind of solutions, do are there streams on all islands?

Yes. There are. Okay. So Kauai Kauai is in better shape right now. We work really well with the county and the state to make sure that those streams are clear.

The big one's gonna be white little stream. We we we know those are pieces. But the two other contiguous streams on mountains, we work pretty well a lot right now. There were jurisdictional issues in the past, but we we tried to do it. Maui as well, same thing.

Volkka, you get some issues that we're gonna have to deal with, especially through the DHL area. So we have this is statewide. This is statewide list. And this is not all all encompassing yet. Next slide, please.

So long term, there's gonna be there's gonna be areas that we're gonna have to address. Portions of our system for for near shoreline erosion, we're gonna have to realign. I mean, we just loan it. It's gonna be a longer term discussions because of the cost and everything. Throughout our system, we're gonna have to start looking at the slopes that we have near our near our roadways.

On the highway, we know we have steep slopes above it, steep slopes below it. And no no getting around it. We're not we cannot realign that at any place. We gotta make sure we protect those slopes. Now the areas where we've we've had competent rock in the past that weathered out to soil, we have to blanket them out or put up some kind of matting to ensure that nobody driving that area can be impacted.

A case in point is Wymea. That area, I'm not gonna open that road completely until we blanket that whole slope and we don't have to worry about any boulders coming down hitting anybody. We're just gonna have to be really aggressive in addressing these type of situations. Next slide, please. I think the rest of it, I mean, I didn't wanna focus just on water, but we can leave it at that.

There's still fire mitigation that we're gonna have to work through. There's still evacuation routes that we gotta consider. So those are other pieces of this presentation that we can talk to later. Okay. Thank you.

Alright. Let's shift to DLNR, I believe.

gonna wrap up with, one county's perspective. And thank you again, doctor Collins, for being here to to have that perspective. Go ahead, DLNR.

And then we're

Hello, chair. Look, new members. I'm with DLNR engineering division. Just highlighted a couple of events that came about through this past storm event. We have primarily on Oahu, we had flooding on the North Shore side in Guadalupe and Menjivar.

We also had a total of potential dam overtoppings at Wahiawa and Kalamonu Six in in the in the central area. And we also had some stream flooding in the Waiapa area and also in Manoa. Just to kinda highlight, the flooding that we saw in Haleiwa and Wailua, I know there was a lot of concerns that a lot of these floodings was aggravated or caused by some of the dams upstream.

And just wanted to point out that the a good portion of that North Shore is in a high risk flood zones. And so that's what's depicted on this map and we did do a a a fly by the other day and Kinda confirmed that a lot of the areas that were impacted that we could see visual evidence of flooding are in these high risk areas that are on this map.

So that's that kind of highlighted to us that that was that the maps just unfortunately, they're they're correct and

that, you know, these residents, despite what the dams are doing upstream, are are still gonna be at risk. And highlighted on this map shows where Opakikam is, and you can see it's kind of in the center of between where Wailua and Haleba is. And that's primarily where the downstream water flow comes down from Wahi Waddaa. But there was still extensive flooding on both sides of that. So, obviously, there's tremendous amount of rainfall that came down.

And on on the next map, it also highlighted that, you know, there is a correlation between spillway flows that come off of Wahiawa Dam and how that impacts Otaki Camp. So historically, once you're you're overflowing the spillway around 80 to 84 feet, you're wanting to start evacuating Otaki Camp because they're gonna start to experience flooding just based off of those spillway flows.

However, during this past event and, you know, Otaki Camp actually started to get a lot of flooding prior to the spillway actually being activated at Wahi 1. And this just shows the drainage area that goes into Otaki Camp. And so downstream from the Wahi 1 Dam to Otaki Camp, the drainage area is almost it's it's on a lower land area, elevation wise, but, just in the the acreage, it's pretty substantial.

So that kind of depicts that. You know, it's not just the dam itself, even if it's improved and it's upgraded to be more of a flood protection type of facility, it still will have its limitations on what it can do to protect the citizens downstream because the watershed there is just so large.

This the next one just Kinda highlights some of the events that Harabedian this is on the second kona low coming through, but, you know, I know there was a lot of concerns or people wondering why there was an evacuation or potential evacuation notice issued. And that was we did have a lot of interaction and correspondence with the city of Honolulu, with National Weather Service, and with Haima as to what was what we're seeing at the dam. So we had engineers that were working on design plans here.

So we actually asked them to rerun some models during the event to try and get a idea of what we're anticipating in terms of rainfall coming in and what we're experiencing at the dam and how much of a time frame do we have before that would actually result in concern at the structure. And it's just, again, based on the uncertainty of the rainfall coming in, we were at a high level going over the spillway.

We we were approaching I don't think we've had an actual evacuation notice issued out for Wahiawa in a long time. So, you know, we knew that this was gonna be a concern for a lot of people. And so we did wanna try and work it out to try and make sure that advance notice was given.

And knowing that the emergency responders to actually activate an evacuation would need at least two to four hours to really carry out that, evacuation. And there are critical facilities in that inundation evacuation area.

So we were in coordination with PONDDM, and I think that's that was our advice is that, you know, going prior to going into the the later hours of the evening that knowing that there was another set of rainfall anticipated to come that night, that there's a good chance that you would hit the trigger point for which we would issue out that evacuation. So they they did issue out a potential notice for evacuation and that we are we were in agreement with that.

We had another incident around that same time at Highway Model 6.

This is a a Dole Foods dam that's near Wahiawa, but slightly off to the Northeast. And that one, you can see on the graph that we the USGS has a gauge there that these systems are very intense, very very rapidly coming in the rainfall. And so the the gauge there did spike. This reservoir was on a restriction. It did have some spillway issues and, but it it did spike and it came within feet.

There is a little bit of discrepancy between what we have on our records and what the owner went out when they were visually inspecting the dam that night as to how much that is. And so we're gonna try and work on establishing better topography there to make sure that we can understand truly what levels we're at in terms of the gauge in relationship to the top of dam spillway.

But they were able to bring that that water level down and the rain did kinda reside pretty quickly, so we got we're fortunate on that. The an evacuation was issued for this this facility downstream. And switching to the Manoa Stream flood that happened, that was a little bit unexpected.

According to National Weather Service, that was about a three to four inch event, which is not I mean, it's a lot of rain, but it's not a tremendous amount of rain that considering the amount of flooding that happened there. It was very intense. I think that they peaked out at one inch in fifteen minutes of rainfall. Woodlawn Bridge dead over top by floodwaters. On this map, this again is showing FEMA's one hundred year flood risk maps.

And on the model that FEMA provides there, you can see that the channel itself is not capable of containing the hundred year event. And so the debris that came down and got lodged in at Woodlawn just aggravated the situation there. I'm not quite sure how much debris was in the bridge. It was when we were there, there are still a lot

of water flowing over it.

So it's kinda unclear to see how much debris was in there, but I think there was some debris that was there and there were larger branches and stumps that got washed up on a home just upstream. Our department does maintain a section of the stream between Manoa Road and Woodlawn. Everything that's in a darker blue on this on this map does identify the areas that we maintain as far as DLNR.

The bridges themselves are county owned, and I think this kinda goes off to what director Sniffen was saying about, you know, there there are jurisdictional hurdles that we have to work through and we're we're working trying to we have good relationships with the county crews out there. It's just these there are these choke points that come through and there was a lot of debris that came down.

And not so much in this one. I think it in the storm that was 2004, February event in Manoa, that one had a tremendous amount of, cut branches and things that just got washed down and and overwhelmed this. But in a similarly, this was another concern. We're, we're working with this. Our crews that go out and inspect and maintain the structure, this facility stretch, they do this quarterly.

And they they also inspect the stream prior to every storm event. So if we have a a warning issued or alert issued by an estimate where it's the rest the week before, the day before our crews are out there inspecting these streams, making sure that there's no large debris that was was disposed of there and then and they would clear it out. So it was clear prior to this event. It's just, was just a large event that came through very intense.

And the last one was for Wyava Stream.

This one is something that, we're working through with our land division, and we have a representative here from our land division as well if there's more detailed questions. But this is not one that we had on our list to clear up. We we do inspect it periodically, and we they've had a contractor clear previously. During this event between the the first kona low and the second kona low, they did retain a contractor to clear this out. Unfortunately, the contractor did not show up.

So that ran into an issue where we had the second event coming in, and we did have a lot of debris. Luckily, they were able to find a second contractor to come in, clear up the debris there. But, again, this in the background on this slide, it does show the hundred year event, and that whole area is impacted by the hundred year event stream flows. The stream kind of meanders a a weird s turn there, but that whole area is prone to flooding.

It's a high risk area.

And it's also on the next slide. You can see that just upstream from that, there's just a lot of vegetation, and it's not a very developed area. And so that's what just gets washed down during these high flow events. You just get a lot of trees, a lot of debris, and that's, unfortunately, that's our our we only maintain the ditch. I mean, the on the the bridge right there, though.

And so it's it's very difficult when you just get impacted with a large amount of debris. And I'm kinda glad to see that this one was on that slide that Dirk has taken out of on the screen. So hopefully that will help us out. But if there's any other questions, takeaways, you know, I think our team from the dam safety side, we know that we wanna work better with, establishing topographies on the dam.

So we're gonna be looking to to update that because we are we have about 30 gauges on these dams out there now, a little over 30.

And we're hoping to get up to, like, 90% of the 122 dams that we do regulate. So we're working on seeing how much our funding will go to expand our gauge network, work on setting these gauges to the proper elevations as to the spillway, top of dam, and we are working with we have a couple of grants that we're trying to issue out that the Sledge did provide for us.

And we're hoping to get up to, like, 90% of the 122 dams that we do regulate. So we're working on seeing how much our funding will go to expand our gauge network, work on setting these gauges to the proper elevations as to the spillway, top of dam, and we are working with we have a couple of grants that we're trying to issue out that the Sledge did provide for us.

And so we're gonna be hopefully issuing out first two this year and and working to shop some more to help these owners to remediate some of these structures. Thank you.

And so we're gonna be hopefully issuing out first two this year and and working to shop some more to help these owners to remediate some of these structures. Thank you.

We're gonna shift now to one county's experience, but I want to

Just a quick question?

Yes. Okay. Here's a quick question.

Because you, are you also responsible for bioswales and basins or no? No. Okay. So is there a separate part of DLNR that works

with those kinds of structures? Basins? Basins. So detention basins. Detention basins.

Yeah.

Those those are smaller structures, and I know that that came through as a bill in previous legislative sessions. We only regulate structures that are larger than 50 acre feet and 25 feet in height. The smaller ones probably fall more under the county DPP.

DPP. Oh, yeah. Perfect. Thank you.

Okay. I wanna give our neighbor island legislators. Is there anything that you heard that you wanna follow-up on before we just shift to city and county of Honolulu?

I'm just wondering, like, you're talking about bridges. You maintain or you check the bridges, but who runs who owns the bridge? You guys, or is it the county, or is it the state?

It depends on this stream. A lot of most of the the bridges are county owned, or if they're, like, a state highway, then it would fall under DOT Right. Primarily. We do have a a bunch of smaller like, this this one in Wyalla is a it's actually a a footbridge.

Yep. The Wyalla one is part of

the Pearl Harbor, like, path kind of unofficially. So that's why we have it up to that bridge. But normally, yes, it would be either here or the county that has the jurisdiction either under right under the bridge or right usually on the Hukai side. Okay. So as long as we know that different ownerships like, you guys need to work together to make sure that these areas are clear, not just DLNR, but mostly the county has to be state.

Because I know there was a bridge that was had some construction structures that blocked it in Laie. And so the waters could not go out and they went in, the community went in and removed it so that the water could go out.

And those are silk fences. All that stuff that you see up, the fencing with all that black Yeah. Dumped on it, those are silk fences. Wasn't blocking anything. The stream overran the rope.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it wasn't that those were in the stream itself.

But I just heard they went in and they removed some stuff and they're thinking, am I gonna get criminally charged for doing that?

So if they were gonna, I would have charged them already. But no action they're taking. I mean, during those emergency events, everybody's trying to protect their their life and property. Yeah. What would that

And just one more quick question because you talked about sandbags. You have legislation about using sand. Right? From whatever I don't know what you guys used for those bags, but were they sandbags?

Yeah. When when so Taima and had had put out sandbags to different communities to make sure that nobody went to the beaches and started digging holes. We we went to the quarries to get sand for them.

Oh, see. The last thing that we wanted was anybody digging a hole at a beach to get sand.

Okay. That's what I wanted to verify because we do legislation not understanding that this is a consequence of some of the things we do. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

That's all I have.

Did you wanna ask anything specific to that?

I have several questions, but I'll ask one now and see if I can answer later. I'm really happy to hear the conversation and several of you mentioned the really fragmented way that streams are being managed in our state, with, you know, DLNR takes care of only this part, DOT will take care of these parts, but it's primarily for our bridges and our infrastructure, and then we have all the private bridges and our infrastructure, and then we have all the private property owners.

I would be interested in hearing from each of you or a few of you on ideas for solutions and how know, we can bring all the stakeholders together and manage our streams as one consecutive body of water rather than all these little parts because it's, not working and all the money and efforts being put into it now is really limited in the efficacy because of, you know, problems that are happening that aren't within your individual jurisdictions. So I don't know if there's any feedback on that.

I think primarily, city and state or counties and state should be responsible for. Overall, if we leave it to private interests to take care of, I don't think it's gonna get done because they're gonna be looking at their own interests versus how it impacts everybody else.

And then I'll give you a couple of, for instance. After the second konadal in the Wailua, Hanifa area, we had people building up berms along the highway so that nothing would go on their property, guaranteeing that the highway would flood by six feet if if everything continued that way. So and I don't blame them. That's what their concern is.

They're protecting their own properties without considering the impacts of everybody else. So just to me, I don't know that we can ever count on. I mean, it's just taking care of the stream themselves. I think it has to come to the city and the state. Now that being said, when it comes to the city, having having a concerted effort to ensure that, it's maintained long term, is easy enough in in just setting a plan, and and a budget for that funding.

We're we're gonna make it easy for everybody. We'll reset everything for the stream. So we're not gonna ask somebody to spend a million and a half, 2,000,000 to clear it or the the time it takes to clear it.

We'll clear it for it.

It should be pretty simple for the different jurisdictions to set that plan together to say this is how we'll maintain it long term. And this is not I should say, this is not just city and state. This is also military. So Waiala Stream, when they flooded over, there's three bridges. There's a footbridge that Illinois has, the state highway that the bridge there, and there's a military bridge above it.

So the military one is one that flooded as well. So those are different jurisdictions. I think it should be pretty simple for all of us to come up with a plan to make sure we we keep the maintenance of those streams in proper order.

Can I follow-up? So I appreciate, director, you saying this. Have there been conversations between the county mayors and, governor to move in this direction and is it formalizing when we see an MOU or what is going to be, I think, the follow-up that we can look to? Again, we appreciate you you are so proactive, director, but what's happened at the level above you at this point? Yeah.

And I think, general can speak that a little bit better on the conversations being had between the mayor and governor. The mayors and governor have been talking about this issue. They wanna make sure it gets addressed. I don't think it got to a point where there's an MOU that's being set right now.

I think at this time, we wanna make sure we clear those streams, how we get those done, and make sure we reset everything to to ensure that before the next storm season, that's all set.

Generally, can I defer to do you wanna add to any of that conversation?

Yeah. I definitely can, sir. I can't speak for the county mayors. Honestly, although I have talked to them a lot throughout this event, and we and and the governor did have a lot of communication between all of us. I believe the governor has set some priorities for the acute phase and a long term recovery phase for this, and a lot of it was allocated towards the Department of Transportation to accomplish what director Sniffen just just just talked about.

I will agree with you that I think a long term approach will be an MOU or an agreement of who is gonna do what at at at at at what times. And I also appreciate this committee's understanding that we are on the verge of the two thousand twenty six hurricane season.

So the more we can do now, the better we can be postured because if the debris blows right back into the streams or it flows back into the streams, we're gonna have greater impacts than we would normally have with with whatever it is, the level of rain or the level of storm surge.

So so I can't really speak for the mayors, like I said, or the or the governor, but he is he is concerned, and he has allocated sufficient or significant resourcing to the Department of Transportation.

I well, here's a follow-up.

Go ahead. Can I just ask that when you're in these conversations that you involve the legislature? Because I think in 1986, we passed act one twenty one, and our community most of my community is now aware of that legislation because it does make stream bed management the responsibility of those private property owners, and it has led to so much of, this mismanagement or, I would say negligence. So I do think we need to look at statute and change statute.

So for me, an MOU would be insufficient, and I would hope that we could move from an MOU perhaps to a legislative agenda as well.

No. And I think this is really important. This is the kind of things that we need to get from these kind of informational briefings because it sets up a work for the interim. And I'm looking to all of my colleagues to be able to do that work for the interim in addition to looking at our partners across the table. Any more follow-up questions on this immediate point?

Because I think we can shift out and we will have more time for questions. We do have this room until 04:00. Alright. Doctor Collins, you're up next.

Aloha, representatives. Pleasure to be with you today. First, I'd like to just share with you that this is very preliminary, very unanalyzed information, even as I was assembling my thoughts and and pulling it together, Kinda low one, Kinda low two runs together. I haven't had a chance to really even debrief with all my other stakeholders and that sort of thing.

So, and all those are in process and we're gonna do an after action process and that sort of thing to get us, to allow us a better situation that we understand what has happened and improve from it.

You know, as you heard from Konolo one start kicking off in March 11, and I would say, you know, we're talking about Konolo 1, Konolo 2, but we can't forget the February that we had starting in with Super Bowl weekend and then two weekends later, and that put a real strain on the emergency management system in terms of the staffing and and and people's hours and and burnout and and that sort of thing. But moving into Kona low one, you know, we led strong.

We led with a press conference where we were focused on trying to get the word out and make everybody know just how dangerous the storm was. We activated our emergency operation center, and we had what I would consider regular kinds of events with the rainfall that had occurred up into the point of on March 13 at 02:28 is when we evacuated Otaki Camp for the first time with in in the first storm.

And in between Otaki Camp, we were really monitoring Wathewa Dam and had many of hours on on the phone corresponding with my partners, with DLNR safety, the Dole Food, dam owners, first responders, that's where we got to.

I think Edwin was talking about how long it would take for us to conduct an evacuation and it was like an hour to get the responders in place, two hours to conduct an operation, and that sort of thing. So those kinds of discussions started off or or were going on on the thirteenth where to a point where we got to a little nervous, and we issued a prepare to evacuate order, never reaching the evacuation order on on the thirteenth.

But that that happened at about 06:55PM, prepare to evacuate, and And then later in that evening, we got a little another surprise about Nuuanu Number 1 by owned by BWS. So we started initiating planning for for evacuation of that particular area in the overnight hours of the thirteenth into the fourteenth, mostly on the fourteenth, early morning hours of the fourteenth.

It was there though that HFD was dispatched to that reservoir and began assisting and pumping out that reservoir, and then we saw a gradual decrease of that reservoir over the next twenty four hours.

And then on the fifteenth, we initiated a windshield survey of damages and opened up our self reporting of damages so that we could get a damage assessment in the hopes of pursuing a presidential declaration after Kona One, not really even focusing at that point on Kona 2. That being said, we did see some weather on the horizon.

Weather service did make us make it known that there were were going to be some weather impacts with the conal o two that was coming up March 19 through the twenty fourth. The forecast, however, for the evening of the nineteenth, we did not expect to be activated.

We did not anticipate a large amount of flooding that evening, but then flood flash flood warning was issued about 10:57PM on the nineteenth, and then that's when we activated our emergency operation center and brought the brought resources in to monitor that weather system.

We went through that evening, had good partnerships with the state. They were aware of what we were doing. We put in a request for high national guard high water vehicles. Though that was early in the evening, when When I say early, not long after we activated 12:37AM, we requested those high water vehicles knowing it takes some time to activate, guard resources, and and and that sort of thing.

We got into the night of monitoring where National Weather Service issued their considerable flash flood warning about 01:53 that morning.

We issued our own alerts through HL alert warning that, we have we were having very significant difficulties in responding to the area due to isolated roads and roads that were, overbund overflowing with water and and so forth. And then at 03:42AM, we issued a catastrophic flooding alert through HNL alert, also triggering a wireless emergency alert system and the EAS system. Just trying to warn everyone that what we were hearing was very significant flooding in in the particular area.

We sounded the sirens after that, 04:23am. And then at 04:53am, National Weather Service came out with a catastrophic flash flood warning that also triggered the wireless emergency alert, EAS, and HNO alert.

And so that really started getting us into the the situation that was unfolding. We were really concerned about a heavy search and rescue mission that needed to happen. Of course, responders do what they can in the middle of the night, but their situational awareness is significantly decreased because, you can't see in the pitch black, you can't see the roads, flashlights only help so much and and that sort of thing.

First light came, we had a very large search and rescue plan that unfolded that included all of our emergency responders, including our ocean safety division, which is not a way that we've ever used them before, but we also had involved in the mix, the National Guard, of course, and then and then the Coast Guard. And so conducted search and rescue activities throughout that morning, but also still evaluating rivers and dams and so forth.

Initiated another evacuation at 08:34 in the morning for that area, and and then sent out several updates throughout the day at 9AM and then 01:03PM. We activated the Honolulu incident management team who then was able to set up first in Mililani, and then eventually moved to Wahiawa District Park a couple days later. But that incident management team begins a great partnership with the National Guard as the general was indicating.

And to my knowledge, this is the first time we've ever activated, SURF P here in Hawaii for a search and rescue mission. And so, the National Guard was used to help support, search and rescue.

We asked for them on the twentieth, and they came back and or came on the twenty first with the SURF P Organization and conducted search and rescue operations. We also obviously had ongoing shelters that were activated, in the beginning of this incident. The, and that was on the twenty first that the CERF peak conducted their search and rescue operations. On the twenty second, we began to really start transition from response to short term recovery and focused a lot on debris management as well.

And so really spent the day getting DFM, ENV involved and initiating the debris management contract that standby debris management contract that City and County in Honolulu has had.

It's the first time that contract has ever been activated as well. And then also work very closely with DOT on all those efforts in terms of debris and so forth. Debris operation, I mean, we did some minimal debris operations on the twenty second, but the heavy burden really began on the March 23, and then at the same time began our damage assessment for the second Kona low.

The twenty third, of course, was the day of the, Manoa flash flood incident, wasn't really predicted, and it caught us a little bit by surprise on that one. And, thankfully, there wasn't a need for, you know, that large search and rescue kind of mission or anything like that, but but did, you know, cause a lot of damage in in its wake.

On the twenty fourth is when the Honolulu incident management team reestablished an incident command post at Wahiawa District Park, and then we were they were tasked with overseeing debris and national guard missions in that area rendering, aid to those that were trying to recover from, the devastating destruction that they experienced. We were able to, initiate, EMAC request through HEMA. We requested the fire department in New York or the New York City fire department's incident management team to come out on the twenty fifth.

And on the twenty sixth, we I'm sorry. And then on the twenty eighth, we also asked for another incident management team from South Carolina, the Palmetto incident management team to come through EMAC as well.

I would tell you that our interactions with EMAC and HiEMA were amazing. I've not seen EMAC work that well that quickly, ever. So, and to really be able to put those requests in with the time difference also and get, you know, answers back all within about two days on each request, was, was amazing and, a credit to the system. The first day that we had community assist assistance centers, was on March 26, where we established those at the Waialua District Park.

Those were very key in trying to provide as many resources from all the different volunteer organizations active in disaster and government agencies, to get the their assistance out to, the community that needed them.

But at the same time, we were very focused on being community led and and government supported. So we really gauged how hard to push and how fast to push and how much to push based on our interaction with our community leaders as well.

That on the twenty eighth is when the FDNY team first arrived, and they married up with the Honolulu incident support team and conduct and continue to conduct operations with the National Guard, DFM, ENV overseeing debris interfacing with the community, of course, and DOT as well. We also began the joint preliminary damage assessment on the twenty eighth, which is us with HIEMA, with with FEMA, all validating the damage, which is a step.

Representative Belotti, you asked about kind of the process and the timing to get that declaration, and this is it's not required.

I've seen declarations come just by 09:11, Katrina. All of those happened without a preliminary damage assessment, but they were obviously no brainers, if you will. But in this case, you you really do need to go through that AP PDA process to help FEMA make the case to the president for that presidential declaration. And then on April 1, the Palmetto incident support team arrived. So, again, showing the quickness of of that EMAC process as it as it were.

From there, we kinda went through, you know, just debris management and community assistance over the next several days before we got into the April event, April severe weather where once again on 04/10, we had to evacuate Otaki Camp. And then last Friday was our last community assistance center day in Wailua.

Although on Saturday, we did have a different twist on it, which was rebuild Oahu with our DPP helping to provide the assistance in terms of rebuilding and permitting and things that we would need to do for for that. So that's kind of an overview of the events for past several months. But in terms of post incident mitigation, obviously, we've heard about the dredging of streams and and DFM has been there supporting that mission and and really hoping that we can get those cleared out.

And in my opinion, I don't think a lot of them, deep into the into the stream, were cleared out, a lot. I mean, it was hard it's harder to access. I know the stream outs are serviced very regularly and and that sort of thing, but I think it's harder to get deeper into the streams. I think you actually saw with the April severe weather, in terms of how we've changed operations at City County of Honolulu.

One, because of the saturation of the of the ground, but I think going forward, you're going to see a lot earlier evacuation warnings happening, rather than, waiting for certain, levels of, of the reservoir to hit or or or that sort of thing.

So we're being a little bit more aggressive on evacuations and warnings. We are currently reevaluating our CIP projects for FY '27 budget to see if there's any water related water management related infrastructure that we might be able to put under get get planning and get in the get in the queue, if you will, for making improvements to the to the water waterway system. DEM has requested more staff out of our FY '27 budget. We'd actually asked for quite a few.

We were moving forward with eight, and now we're and as FY '27 budget is still in the works, we're asking actually for more, more staff members to join us at DEM to help increase the capacity of what DEM can provide to the community.

We maintain current prod so one of the things that we've been working on as well is an AI based early hazards detect early all hazards detection system. And because that's risk based and because it's based on one of the risks obviously is flash flooding. That's one that we're obviously continuing to pursue. Those are slated to be funded by homeland security grants that we received from the Federal Government, and so we're looking into that.

And as soon as those homeland security grants become available, then we'll initiate a project team with many of the stakeholders you have here getting together and and and trying to start to piece together what should be a good situational awareness tool to help us understand what situations are looking like out there when they're being impacted by severe weather.

We're also obviously going through an AAR process where we're going to evaluate our response, but as well as what led to this particular disaster and really evaluate what can be done from a project standpoint to mitigate flooding in the future.

Aye, you know, I've heard some of the conversations about the stream maintenance and that's been one on high on my list as well as far as something that needs to be corrected and I agree with the other panelists that talked about the complexity of, you know, whether it's a section of it of the streams are city owned, state owned, privately owned and so forth and they're just not getting maintained. There's a lot of people that will just point the fingers at other people.

It's the state's responsibility. It's the city's responsibility.

It's private responsibility. I think I agree with you, representative, that there just needs to be one agency, involved, and it would take a, legislative change. And, I would you would have my support, for that. And that's the NMI report pending your questions.

I know that there's gonna be questions and that's a lot of information. I have some, but I wanna defer to my colleagues. Any questions? You know what? Let's let's go ahead.

Rakim Hussain did not ask the question. Go ahead, Rakim Hussain.

Thank you all for being here and for your positions.

Are we able to get, like, written reports of what was presented just for the record?

I think we can provide the presentations. I think right now, given the kind of constraints we're in, it's a little bit, bit of maybe too much to ask, but we can follow-up later with another set of information briefings as needed. Sure. But I would not wanna put that burden on it at the moment. So we will provide what we do have.

And this is being recorded. Right? Yes.

And this is being recorded. So you can go back and do this.

If we have further questions,

do we direct it to the Chair?

You're welcome to direct it towards me, but also you have your, ability to also reach out to Gary. Yes.

Okay. Great. Yes.

So I have, for, Director Collins, I just have some questions, I think, about the immediate incident. So the moments of the the evening of the second Kona low, because that's where most of the community upset still sits. So and it also kind of, I think, points to some weaknesses in our disaster response and anticipation systems. So at approximately 08:25, stream gap gauges were in Opaiula Stream were already showing rapid increases. That's can you give us a date?

Oh, so that's the that's Thursday evening.

Nineteen.

Nineteen. Yeah. And, you know, this is a known floodplain, and I'm sure as the director, you're familiar with all the floodplains. But the EOC wasn't activated until 11PM.

And that's curious to me. It's alarming to me because I watched the city and county, special committee where they asked you folks, a lot of questions about those events that, over those two days. And, it seemed to me that the constant refrain was that you folks were relying on the rising levels of the dam as your singular metric for anticipating and responding to possible flooding.

And I wonder why no one would seem to have been watching those stream gauges because in our community, we had people reaching out. There's a a system, I think, Viasay or something.

I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but it's a a system that city employees use when they Wanna Log information in. We had people reaching out using that system, providing notification that stream levels were rising rapidly, and yet the three people who were supposed to be, you know, managing and and watching and use them it turns out in this hearing also that they they can get a call, but they don't have to respond to a call.

So we actually don't know who's watching even if though we on paper, we have a twenty four hour system. Yeah. So I think that that's the source of a lot of continued anxiety because what I heard and what other people in the community heard from that conversation at the city and county level was that that was where the analysis sits and where it's gonna continue to sit.

And so I'm asking you, is it your intention moving forward to move away from the what I would consider, and probably the wrong word choice, but a simplistic metrics, of metric of using the dam level because the dam only controls Kalpenbullet, which is, as DLNR has has pointed out, is one small part of our flood chain. So is there an intention to move away from that metric and towards a more holistic analysis of stream gauges and and other kinds of data?

Yes, ma'am. And that's what that AI project is all about. It should be not just monitoring Reservoir levels and not just monitoring even the streams, but, we can put those, those monitors in in many different places. So when things that are getting flooded that shouldn't be getting flooded, are start telling us a story. That's something that we don't have right now.

We don't have flood gauges over just a regular roadway.

But we

do have stream gauges that should have helped in that moment. So and I will just say that AI is only as good as the input it is provided

100%.

And the human operators. So

Can I interject? Because I have a whole lot of questions here. Yep. When I heard you say that you're gonna deploy an AI system. One of the immediate questions that came to mind was

that drone technology. Is it you're syncing more hardware so that you can you can identify? Is that the kind of AI systems you're talking about?

The AI system should be a machine learning system that can factor in all kinds of variables that we are not able to or that we aren't allowed to do. That means that we have to put infrastructure in that's gonna give us more readings than we're getting right now and leverage the the the infrastructure that we already do have. And so it needs to bring in that data and consume that data.

And then the AI system through machine learning can understand the various variables and and be used to tell us things that we can't normally put together outside of that.

And then can I just interject here? Because what I heard just heard representative Caruso say is that we can the AI is as good as the infrastructure we have is the input that we're getting out. But what she was also describing is a low tech system where there were people, human beings talking to each other, community calling in to some state some county agency reporting.

What I'm asking you is are there low tech fixes that you can implement right away so that, for example, community calling in and saying, oh my god, I'm seeing this stream going off, then that person who's sitting there is like, I'm gonna report this to somebody.

And you start to do that kind of low tech, person to person implementation now so that in October when we have something coming, we're gonna get a commitment that the city and county people are gonna respond in a way that's useful.

That's certainly something that we can look into, but that is not anything that we have on the radar screen right now.

Yeah. I think that's really important because there's low tech things that can be done, human to human things that can be done, but also and I really appreciate it. I mean, I you know, at the beginning of session, I was talking to folks about AI and use of drones and all of this to better improve our, notification system, but we cannot lose sight of the fact that it's actually all of these approaches. Low tech, high-tech, and the high-tech is gonna be more expensive.

So if we need immediate things to do now, let's get the immediate things also fixed.

And that's just what I want. Thank you. And thank you for letting me say that. But that's that's where I wanted to intersect because that is we all have said that it's the people in Hawaii that make a difference. But when the people in Hawaii are calling government and they hear and they face a roadblock, that is a problem.

So and I know it's hard because everyone, like you said, was burned out. Everyone was tired. We're all tired of these systems coming through. But we have to be better in government, and I know we can be because I know you guys are all sitting here trying to better. Thank you for letting me get on my soapbox.

Did you have another question?

I do have one more question about communication,

but I also wanted to say that, I am hoping as we continue to move forward and even with our HARP preparation, you know, what we don't plan for in HARP is the exhaustion and the waves of events. And I think that we got really lucky with Kona three that it was minimal. We really got lucky, because we were in a really bad position after Kona two. So I just wanna kinda point that out and hope we can work on that some more.

But then also so around the communication piece.

Right? If the first broad emergency alert happened, at 03:42 in the morning.

I don't agree with that.

Okay.

So that's what I mean, that's kind of what what is your assessment then?

My assessment is that no. The first the first broad warning that came across on wireless emergency alert was at was initiated by the National Weather Service at 01:53AM.

Okay. I oh, I mean, I'm saying the siren.

Why the delay? It was already starting to flood at 08:52.

I don't agree with that one either.

I mean, that's what it was happening in Waialua. That's what was happening. And by 11:00, we saw people having to be rescued. So

I'm not aware of that either.

I think there's been a lot of testimony to that effect. For example, the North Shore Neighborhood Board, if you come out into our community and talk to people, that is what many, many people will share with you. So and it's true, like, it the much of the community or some part of the community is in a flood plain, but they were taken by surprise.

And I also just think that it's going back to what I said earlier about this disaster exhaustion and that we were exhausted from cone o one and that that we let our guards down. And so I'm wondering if you are thinking about that, like, in terms of building more resilience into your own responsiveness as an agency.

We absolutely

beyond staffing. Right? Like, beyond staffing. Because it is a mindset, I think, to be planning for to be twenty four seven for a season. That's a mindset, that I I feel like part of why things kind of fell apart in Kona two was that, there wasn't that capacity.

There wasn't that resilience.

Is there a question? Or?

Yeah, that question is-

I didn't respond. I'm 24/7 to me translates to I need staffing. And you say I can't do staffing. So I can only do so much with 15 people.

So, I'm not saying it's not staffing. I'm saying on top of. I'm a huge supporter of additional staff and resources. That's not it. I'm saying in terms of training, in terms of the narrative, like, what you get the community ready for and what you get your people ready for.

It's I, I really. Like, in hurricane season, it's a season. Right? And I'm starting to think that climate change, we need to be capable of being resilient through a season of these kinds of events. So that's kind of my question. Are you thinking about in terms of it in, in those terms or not at all?

I think that we think about community education constantly, and it's not in seasons because we have hazards that are, that are seasonless. We have, you know, tsunamis. We have. Obviously, we do want to center around when things are going to happen, so to prepare for hurricanes before hurricane season, of course.

And then we have our, you know, wild land fire season and so forth, but I think community education is a hallmark of what we do, and we try our best to really get information out there and to really encourage our, all of our community to prepare, to be prepared to have their plans to have their stockpiles of resources of food, water, etcetera.

And so we're certainly not going to take our foot off the gas in, in regards to community education and outreach, and certainly wanna push even more training. We've, we've actually allocated a lot of the homeland security dollars for expanding community preparedness activities. So that's something that we do want a 100% to increase.

Thank you.

Other questions? May I have one? Questions for a home Yeah. For every can you frame one?

Not not a bunch. I think there's a lot to learn from Kauai even though we were, we were getting hard. We're small women, and we were able to figure things out quicker. But you say that power, communication, water is very important. Yes.

Very important. That's why Kauai has in place generators at their centers that you know, where they're gonna distribute things. They're ready to go. The road guys are at the Bay Shark waiting for it to happen, then they're gonna go out as soon as it happens. Right?

What really surprised me in this incident was when I heard one of my relatives say, "I cannot use my toilet. I can't use my water because the sewer won't go down." And then I find that I'm thinking, okay. So sewer should have a pump. Right?

Not here on Oahu. Your system is made where each individual house has to have their own electricity to pump that stuff out. So they couldn't go to the toilet. They couldn't wash dishes.

They couldn't take a bath. They had to go to some place where they had a big septic system or something. So that's something you guys, you guys probably don't know. You don't know how to educate your communities about those things. People need to know, we need the generator, right, if our sewage does not work.

I think flooding is one issue. If you get hit by a hurricane, you all know how devastating it's gonna be for a while, and that's something that we probably need the whole state to come in and share their experiences so you guys will be able to deal with this when it happens. That's all I want to say. No question.

I wanna build up on that comment because I think we do have a lot to learn from the neighbor islands and also from the resiliency hubs that we keep coming back to, that their communities somehow are far more prepared. And what I'm concerned about is during the Kona Lows, we didn't see much bad things happen in, like, the urban core, which I represent. But can you imagine if all of a sudden the urban core was struck in the way that Waialua was struck?

Now you're talking about lots and lots and lots and lots more people. And so that's what I'm concerned about.

And so that kind of. It's more than just public education. It is a mindset that we have to get in as community and government. And I think, again, a need for a summit to make sure that we're learning. And what I've learned from this committee is that separate islands, Hawaii Island runs drills as a community every year. We don't do that on Oahu.

And I know it's, it's probably incredibly more complicated to do something like that on Oahu, but we better start thinking about ways to drill. And you know what? You're gonna have a population that's gonna be willing to drill. You have a population that wants to help. So let's figure out a way to do that.

And I don't know if that's a partnership between HIEMA and, and counties, but let's start thinking about that now because that's the way to be proactive. Sorry. I think but, you know, thank you. Thank you. Just thank you because we need to learn from the other neighbor islands and it's so important.

Yes. For, Mr. Bravender. During the first storm, the Molokai Radar was inoperable, but by the second storm, it was corrected and fixed. Is that, is that right? Was it operable for the second storm?

No, I don't think so.

Oh, it was not?

It wasn't fixed until the April. was not.

Okay. So, it was not operable for either of the storms. That's a really important radar for the whole state. So is it fixed and corrected and stable now into the future, or are there more issues?

There are more, is actually it might be down right now. Techs were over at Molokai working on it late last week, and they extended it through tomorrow. This event in March, that's not the only time. We had a really long outage back in December into January as well.

So this is. They're not. I, I don't think they're all tied together. Different parts of a break, but it has been problematic over time. And it's the combination of having techs on Oahu needing to fly over to troubleshoot and then go back and fix, and then the, the fact of shipping parts. That's been the issue. The.

Yes, we rely on that as the best coverage over Oahu. We do have four other radar, three other radars across the island. We have four total with some overlap. So, so, during the event, we still had coverage here on Oahu. Molokai can't really see on the edge of Kawaii, edge of North Kohala, Maui Island.

Some coverage just not where it was blocked by Haleakala. So there, there's gaps when one goes down. There's enough coverage between that overlap and other tools between satellites, the, the, the mesoscale sectors that gives us minute to minute imagery in the ring gauges. We were able to keep warnings out the whole time.

So for that radar on Molokai, though. Are we expecting it to keep breaking down and having to send people over to fix it, or is. What do we need to get it to be a stable operating radar?

That is a wonderful question. I don't know. It's nothing. The same thing is, will keep happening. Between the. It's built in the, installed in the early 1990s.

Do we need to replace it?

Well, they, they're-

What do we need to like. What would we need to do to have that be, like, a dependable resource of information?

I will gladly take hard questions like this back to our national headquarters and say, "Hey, we need a solution."

Perhaps we need to take a turn on delegation.

Yeah. Okay.

It's, it's one of those things that within our office we, we, we talked about this is unacceptable, but this is what we're dealing with right now. And we're, you know, our operational forecasters, we're making do with with the tools we have. And it's the hard questions like that that, yes, we, I don't know if that's a new radar there. I don't know if we need two in different locations that are provide better coverage and more easily serviceable.

Fifteen years ago, we had a technician, based on Molokai, who was able to at least troubleshoot and still needed to order parts, but that was the problem that we ran into between the, the code one and code two events was that we couldn't even get a technician to travel over there. And

Yes.

Okay.

Well, thank you. I even appreciate that response because it helps us figure out how we can help moving forward too, even if it's not, you know.

I, I have a curious question. You said it's 1990s technology. Is there better technology system that's been developed?

Yep. So it's actually the, the, the radar is called the WSR-88D. So, weather surveillance radar 1988 Doppler is the-

What we're operating on.

And then they're installed. It's really new to the '90s. Right now, we have new technology that they're looking at deploying for the next generation. It's a fixture face rig. It gives better coverage, but it's a matter of getting it operationalized, deployed.

And I don't know what the time scale is for that.

Follow-up question? Not a follow-up question for that.

Well, actually, I do have a follow-up question, which is more to do with weather patterns and these extreme weather events. And I, I wonder if, you know, the. I'm wondering if the in, unpredictability of the event, doesn't that, shouldn't that make us more alarmed? Like, shouldn't we be more on edge? Because I. What I heard you saying is that we couldn't predict it.

We didn't know exactly when it was gonna hit or where it was gonna hit. So, you know? And, and for me, that's. The uncertainty means that we should be activating more response around more areas and for a wider period of time.

Okay. I. One, I apologize. I don't wanna cause any unnecessary anxiety.

We live in a state of anxiety.

Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. When we're looking at preparing for events, especially days out, like, whether it's a hurricane or event like this. When you talk about prepositioning supplies or prepositioning high water vehicles, I can't confidently tell you, the day before, this island is gonna be impacted and that island won't.

We, we saw that with, Sylaka. Is, is it headed towards Guam? Is it headed towards Tinian or Saipan? Like, who's gonna get impacted? That. that there's uncertainty from that early planning standpoint. Once we get into the event, like, we, you're talking about the, the Thursday night flooding.

I, I wasn't sure if I should have chimed in. Well, you're talking about low, low tech solutions. I, I wanna walk out of this talk with Randy about how we can get more information discussion faster because that Thursday night, in it, before the we put that flash flood warning out at 10:57pm or whatever it was. We had a flood advisory out from 06:00pm earlier that evening. So we were, we were seeing heavy, we were seeing rain.

We didn't think it was that heavy. But it's. If there's community reports, things like that are happening and we know that we can upgrade earlier. We can be more, help get that message out to be that mouthpiece to alert more people. And that's something that we can do with I guess better coordination. So that's coming together like these are what we've learned during an after action report or after action review that we just haven't had a chance to do because we keep having more events.

So this drives home, so this, thank you for that.

I have one more question.

Go ahead. I actually have a follow-up on this kind of, like, the. How do we. How do we use dynamic data coming in? But go with your question.

Okay. Well, it might one-

It might build into-

Yes. So, it has to do with the language of the communication. So, our community is not used to getting an alert that says catastrophic imminent failure of the dam. And for many folks who have watched, like, blockbuster movies, that means, like, the dam splitting open and all that, you know, it's really frightening.

So, and I. I've been asking people, and it's been and I watched that, as I said, that here, that committee meeting with the city, and I still don't have a good sense of where that language came from.

I am hoping that we can move. It came from you?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked about this. This is one of the first things we addressed. I I'm sorry. Are you okay.

So my question is, like, can we move away from that language and still convey a sense of urgency? Because I feel like that does not do, doesn't trigger the right response in the community.

I, I agree. And then it's. So, before the the April events, I sat down with Randy and Jennifer at the end and say, "Hey, what can we do differently?" The. When we went into this event, we had a, a trigger set up with, with the, the first responder evacuation estimates two to four hours. Okay.

You need to get people out this time even though the dam 88 or 90 feet depending on the the dam top. Okay. We'll set at 85 feet as the, that trigger point. And that was set as a flash flood warning for a dam break, which is the, is the options are imminent or occurring, and that's an inappropriate product. That is essentially, by definition, a flash flood watch for potential dam failure.

And that's what, had this happened in April. We wouldn't have done a flash flood warning for dam break. It would have been that special flash flood warning still for the small area, but with the wording of potential failure, and we'll have that tied with their evacuation orders.

And I think. I think what you're seeing, what you have seen, is the wording that we chose, we choose, chose, also comes directly from the, emergency action plans at the dams. And so those, those dams use the word imminent and failure. And. And I think we've realized that's as you mentioned, the, the community doesn't understand those words coming out of the plan and, and why the, it's worded like that, and that they have visions of Hollywood in their heads and, and, and that sort of thing.

And so we, we've already started changing the messaging.

Excellent. Thank you so much. Yeah.

I would I would just add to that. That those emergency action plans that we have for the dams, we base that off of a FEMA guidance manuals. I think it's FEMA 64 or something. And that's the exact language that well, Yes. And so we're trying to-

They're giving us money.

We're trying to be compliant, in terms, of how it's, it's word nationally, but I think that agreeably that we could have better conversations on how we relay that to the public.

Yeah.

And so, that's some. That's a. That's definitely a takeaway that we, we did learn, but it is in our recession plans that if they hit that last level-

Yep.

That it's imminent. And that's what the dam owners are trained to relay over to DEM.

And then the other piece, like, of course, around the communication is the siren activate activation. You know, I think that people were waiting for. I, I had hundreds of conversations with people who said they were waiting for the siren.

Okay.

So, just so, to put that on your radar.

Well and to put it on your radar as well, the community education, as you mentioned earlier, we need to get a lot better about what sirens are. Sirens are an outdoor warning system only. And they don't warn you, and they don't, when you hear the sirens, you're not supposed to evacuate. When you hear the sirens, you're supposed to seek more information, turn on the TV, turn on the radio, get your phone. So and they're not intended to alert anyone indoor.

That's where they should get to NOAA weather radio to wake them up when it goes off and, and, and that sort of thing. So we've got to, to improve what sirens mean.

Right.

But I think, to yours or Representative Belatti's mentioned before, we still have to focus on the system of systems. It's not just the, the. It's not just the weather service putting out their information. It's not just us doing a press conference. It's not the sirens. It's all of those things put together.

It's the, it's the, the stream gauges along with the, the HNL alerts and the phones and community preparedness all put together. So it's a system of systems that we have to improve.

Okay. And oh, wait. Iwamoto has one question, and I wanna be cognizant of the time we are I wanna wrap to, like, in the next five to ten minutes.

Sorry. I was just gonna ask, what is the, I assume, that if there's catastrophic failure of the dam, it's like a cliff. I mean, there's where it's like, this is just blank. and then or it's just.

This is just a spillway.

So it was never that the dam wall would just open up. Oh, okay. I know. That's the impression I-

You're wrong. And that's what I wanted to clarify. There are reservoirs and there are dams. So Koloko was a reservoir that collapsed. Right? So are you calling big reservoirs like what we have in Koloa? Like a dam?

So the dam, by definition, we if it's a man made embankment-

Yeah.

Then that's the dam, and the water that's held behind that embankment is the reservoir. So it's. We use it almost synonymously because on some of these, the owners name it this certain reservoir, and then on some, they call it the dam. But it, it is, it's one and the same.

And when we hit those emergency action plans and we say that this dam is that, it's hit this imminent failure trigger, what we're concerned about is that dam will actually overtop.

And because 99% of our dams are earthen, made out of dirt, if they get overtopped and the water actually starts to spill over the top of the, the crust of the dam, that's when they're highly susceptible to failing. It doesn't necessarily mean that they fail right away. Like, we had that before where dams can be overtopped but not fail.

Got it. Okay.

K. That's I, I did. have well, quick. Okay.

I love this. My community. Our community wants to learn and ask questions, so I'm sorry. We're gonna have to do a few more things.

Thank you. About Hokulani Elementary School. Oh, sorry. Reagan wants to

Hokulani Elementary School, is that in a flood. It was flooded. Was that a previous flood plain area previously, or was that kind of a new thing?

No. No. No. Go. Go.

So, I would just say that if you go to our flood hazard risk assessment tool that's on our website, the fhat.kauai.gov. That section is in a, partially into a floodway and, like, a A zone, which is, like, it's a high risk. And, when the Army Corps of Engineers did the Ala Wai Project, that they were trying to, that, that area was already. It's a, it's a, it's a choke point coming in.

It's taking all of NOAA coming through, down that way on its way to the Ala Wai, and they had that, that area identified as a detention based and that's, as a potential remedy. But I don't think it was gonna really resolve that school is actually put in a a pretty low spot, unfortunately.

Thank you.

I'll repue it.

Thank you. For Mr. Barros, for the damage assessment report tool that I think is on your website, it's also on NEMA's website from Haleiwa County. I'm wondering how well utilized that is by, like. What kind of reports or reporting is your pricing coming in? And because in my community, there were a lot of QR codes posted around, but I think what was missing was a physical person sitting at a table helping people work through the reporting process.

So, we. The numbers keep growing-

Okay.

At the state level from all the counties. We're seeing increasing numbers, and we're slowly getting FEMA registration in there. So was it used early on? My hunch is there, there's a disconnect early on that we gotta fix so that people can readily jump on as soon, as, as soon as we need them to.

But what, we are fixing it, and we're, we're, we're. Like I said, we're seeing numbers go up, and that'll give us a better look at when. Someone asked, the amount of damage, in the state. And somebody asked, well, how much federal money is coming in? We're not gonna know that until we get the damage assessments. So, I think in the next by the 7th of May, the PA stuff. We'll get those kind of numbers.

So there was a disconnect early on that, that we're fixing.

Community reports are really important to helping you develop, like, the assessments more accurately?

Yes. Okay. Yes.

Thank you. So I'll say in, in Waialua, LW was, was instrumental in going out door to door, talking to everybody about assessments, what the, what they're required to do, and helping out a lot of the kupuna and filling them, filling them out. Having, having that, that high touch approach was huge. Getting everybody to the Haleʻiwa Park to make sure they could have somebody there to help out was absolutely tremendous. But, but driving them there was, was a big thing.

Well, I think that would have been great too.

Yeah. Yeah.

To have somebody going door to door.

Yeah. So we. We're gonna have to, we're gonna have to do that. I think, I think there's several pieces that we're gonna have to start improving on before the next storms. I think we, we all agree that these three storms together were bad, but nothing compared to a CAT four. So James had talked a little bit about the state's where, wherewithal and resources that require it to respond, something like that.

We, we know enough. So getting out to communities to start making sure that we have contacts to contractors now, before the next storm, can be huge. Just, just so they know, they'll have a contract with us so they can start up the next day. They know where to dump, where to, where to move material, who to call for, for direction. It's gonna be big and that's what James is working, working on already.

Making sure as a rep or call it, talked about getting resiliency hubs in different areas to ensure that everybody has power and water filled in their, in their different community areas. So that, once the the disaster occurs, there's, there's a response that we can, can make already. There is something to the public saying that the government takes too long to respond. I mean, it's gonna take a couple of days to, to make sure that everything is is mobilized.

But if we have those hubs in different areas and our contracts with those contractors who were in communities now, it's gonna be big.

So for us, we're working with different contractors within communities. First to give them that shot so they can understand what it, what it, what it looks like to work with the government. The Rida's in Waialua area, working with Nai'i in, in Waiahole-Waikane area to clear those streams. So we can let them know this is what it would be like for us to contract with you during emergency situations.

Right now, I gotta say, with this emergency proclamation out there, I will Malcolm, as much as possible to ensure that we get as much done as we can, with the waivers that we have right now. But also to make sure that we can connect up with different contractors in different communities so we can have these conversations.

And second, like you had talked about, making sure that we have people that we can contact to say, here's what we need. Here's what the city and the counties need from you to make sure these assessments are filled in. Please start going door to door and let us know which which houses you're here.

I think especially after these events, we do have a lot of community members that are willing to help, but they just need to be empowered with the, the tools and know how to be activated.

I think there's one group in the community that, that we kinda forget in the in the farmers. For them, not only did they lose all their homes and their, and their property, but they lost a crop. In those areas, in general, from what I understand, crop insurance is just not a good deal for them. So they just don't go with it. Many of them gonna have to start from scratch.

They their. Their crop is gone for this next, this next haul. They start from the beginning and move forward. Getting the $1,500 really not gonna be enough for them. So getting, getting some kind of backup for them in some way, shape, or form would be.

Alright. I'm really cognizant of our time. I think we could stay here and actually, like, do a lot of brainstorming and talking and finding more ways to to collaborate and to find, actually, real solutions because I've already heard a couple of things here that I have not heard in the public discourse, up to this point. So I really wanna say I appreciate all of you for for coming forward.

I really appreciate my colleagues for, for participating in this and helping us move this forward because I think this is gonna be, as everyone has said, an all of government approach and a system of systems that we have to fix, and so that takes all of us.

On that note, we will collect the presentations we have. Members, please feel free to reach out to any of our wonderful speakers, and we will always continue the conversation, and please have a successful and productive conference. We are adjourned.