Flooding that turned coffee fields into wastelands of rock this week has Kainaliu coffee farmers asking how the water can be managed in a way that doesn’t pit neighbor against neighbor. ADVERTISING Flooding that turned coffee fields into wastelands of
Flooding that turned coffee fields into wastelands of rock this week has Kainaliu coffee farmers asking how the water can be managed in a way that doesn’t pit neighbor against neighbor.
When rain clouds parked over the Kona coffee belt and dumped up to three inches an hour on Thursday, Nasi Fernandez’s coffee orchard became a deep-cut gorge of mud and bare rock, coffee trees uprooted and buried, an acre and half of land stripped and rendered unusable. When the channel exited his property, it charged through Shawna Gunnarson’s farm, leaving trenches and boulder fields through her coffee trees. It filled her pastures with mud, flooded greenhouses and outbuildings, and ripped out fencing and irrigation.
“It was like a freight train,” she said. “Terrifying.”
Saturday, Gunnarson estimated the flood has cost her at least $20,000, not counting an acre of lost orchard and the labor it will take to dig out buried coffee trees so their roots don’t smother under the new layer of soil.
Gunnarson doesn’t blame the Fernandezs for the landslide of rock and flood debris any more than that family is able to pinpoint the source mauka of their own farm. But it begs the question a lot of folks along the road have been asking themselves over the past couple of days.
“How will development up mauka be managed in such a way that that it doesn’t affect the people down below?” asked Ruth Fernandez, standing at the edge of a muddy road with other farmers and neighbors Saturday.
The development in question isn’t necessarily sprawling earthmoving projects, roads or housing complexes. It’s as simple as one neighbor building a stone wall to keep flooding out of a garage or another neighbor trenching a known flow to one side of an orchard.
They’re simple property-saving measures that have one problem: No one knows where the water is going to go next, so flood planning becomes impossible.
Gunnarson invited a county engineer out to her ravaged farm and animal sanctuary on Friday. She had one major question for him:
“Can you help our community develop a plan to manage this water? Because someone is going to get seriously hurt. You can point fingers all you want, but we need a plan.”
Gene Yap has lived on Hokukano Road for 43 years. In past floods, he has used a pickup to rescue stranded neighbors. But he’s never seen damage on a scale like this. When a river from up mauka made a muddy torrent of fields and yards stretching below his home, the sound alone was frightening.
Unless you stood there and looked, you’d have thought it was impossible, Yap said.
“The systemic problem is there is just no understanding of the water,” he said, nursing his pickup along a damaged road through coffee orchards.
The residents of Hokukano are not alone. Crops and property all through North and South Kona have been damaged by some of the most sever flooding the area has seen in decades, prompting many to ponder how runoff is handled — or not handled — and how recent development has potentially made things worse by altering waterways and creating more impervious surfaces where water cannot be absorbed into the ground.
It’s not yet clear how or if county officials will address the problem.
“I been trying to tell people not to go after each other,” Yap said. “Because everyone is trying to divert the water away from their own place. You can’t blame them. But where does it go? Your neighbor’s place. A lot of people here are blaming the neighbor up above.”
Rick Academia is the caretaker of the Maile Lani duplexes in Kainaliu, where water heaters were damaged in the flooding. Thursday’s flow blew out a retaining wall and eroded the foundation of his house. With another tropical system set to soak the island this weekend, Academia is worried the home could lose its structural integrity in the next go-round.
Residents say a comprehensive flood control plan must be mapped out, rather than each owner trying to manage flooding on their own.
“There needs to be some accountability,” Yap said. “We know there’s a problem. Why isn’t anything being done?”
