Huge potholes. Torn-up concrete. Hardly any road left. That’s how some Kula residents described their roads after the fire debris cleanup process wrapped up.
Donna Waters lives on Alanuilili Place, a private, dead-end street with a handful of homes. Residents are normally responsible for road maintenance and she said the road was not built for the heavy machinery involved in the fire cleanup process.
“They started with the heavy equipment, hauling out metal and cars and concrete. We had cranes,” she said. “Every time these guys came up and down the road, they busted the sides of the road. So we had busted sides, and then we had potholes, and it just got worse and worse.”
Residents talked with the project manager to raise red flags during the cleanup. They followed up afterward with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that led the effort. They talked to county councilmembers. For months, the community has been trying to find out who’s responsible for these damages.
In the meantime, residents are getting quoted between $70,000 and $150,000 for out-of-pocket road repairs.
Waters said she’s “beyond frustrated.”
“People have lost their homes. They've lost everything in it,” she explained. “We're on a private road, so we have to clean up after you guys [federal contractors] cleaned up at our own expense. And everybody on this road is retired. We're from mid-60s to mid-80s. Nobody's rich. And we just realized, nobody's coming to save us.”
Monica Loui owns Kula Sandalwoods Cafe and Inn off Haleakalā Highway. The business has been closed for almost a year due to fire and wind damage. Loui signed a right of entry for debris cleanup on her property — but that’s where the agreement ended.
She said FEMA and the Army Corps used her parking lots to stage cleanup efforts in the community for two and a half months.
“When they had phase two (of the cleanup process), that's when the trucks and the tankers and the heavy machinery came in, and they were on our property from 5:30 in the morning to 5:30 in the afternoon. A lot of damage happened during that period of time. It cracked concrete. It sunk the concrete.”
Loui said the current condition of her parking lots poses a safety hazard to customers when she hopes to reopen in the fall.
“It's very unfortunate, because when I got the estimates to try to fix it, it's close to $150,000, which I don't know how we're going to pay, being closed, and that's going to be a real challenge for us," she said.
The issue is further complicated because some residents, like Waters, whose home miraculously didn’t get burned, also don’t have any agreements with the county.
“I didn't sign a right of entry form for anyone to come down this road, but I will have to handle the collateral damage that was done because I live here,” she said.
Alanuilili resident Shackley Raffetto did lose his home in the fire.
"We had talked to them about, 'This is beating up our road here,'" Raffetto said about FEMA and the Army Corps. "And they said, 'Yeah, well, we can help with that.'"
"And then after they were all done, I got a call just out of the blue from some army captain from Alaska, said he was with the Corps of Engineers. He said, 'Well we looked at the photographs, and we just said we're not going to do anything.' And that was that.”
In addition to roadways and parking lots, many driveways also suffered damage.
Kyle Ellison, founder of the grassroots organization Mālama Kula and resident of the area, has been helping lead the charge to get answers.
"It's been met with dead ends everywhere and from everyone," he said. "It's one of those things that's falling through the cracks and everyone is just going, 'It's not our kuleana,' And in the meantime, people who don't have houses and are 80 years old, can barely get to their house and are trying to fix driveways themselves."
Ruth Mori is one of those neighbors who has taken repairs into her own hands.
“Because of these trucks, I probably, on my own, bought 20 bags of 25-pound bags of asphalt, just to do minimum repair,” she said.
After months, residents were finally told they would need to file a damage claim with Maui County. Right of entry forms signed for the debris cleanup are actually contracts with the county. The claim form also requires three signed estimates on repair work.
Waters said she’s not sure how they’ll move forward.
“Quite honestly, I don't know that I have it in me to do that, because I really have, at this point, zero faith that it's going to go anywhere,” she said.
Kari McCarthy agreed. She lost her home on Kualono Place, another private road with equipment damages.
“Those seem like perfectly normal steps to take if you're trying to be reimbursed, but it's they're huge hurdles if you have a million things going on, from your home already burning to now, I got to go get three bids on work that or damages that I didn't even do,” she said.
