A government spokesperson can take questions and criticisms from the community following a disaster. But what happens when that spokesperson is a community member?
Kathleen Pahinui spoke directly to Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi at a North Shore Neighborhood Board meeting last week.
"I cannot tell you how stressed I was, how all these people were stressed getting alerts that make no sense," she said.
Pahinui was one of hundreds of residents who fled severe flooding and a potential dam failure. She’s a longtime resident who lives off Kukea Circle in Waialua — right in the evacuation zone of the Wahiawā Dam.
"We get an alert that says the dam is failing. Then we get an alert, it's like, 'Oh no, everything's all good, don't worry about it, but it may fail,'" she said. "I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor, but that's not acceptable."
At that moment, Pahinui was not on the clock for the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, a semi-autonomous agency. She was a concerned community member and chair of the North Shore Neighborhood Board.
"I felt strongly, as a comms person, that there were some failures, and felt strongly that I needed to share that with him," she said. "I wasn't trying to attack anybody or go after anybody. I just felt that there were some things that didn't happen that needed to happen."
Pahinui has been working at the Board of Water Supply for almost a decade, so she’s no stranger to disasters, like the 2017 transmission main break on Kalanianaʻole Highway and the Red Hill fuel leak in 2021.
But this was the first crisis in her career that happened right in her backyard.
"Oh boy, it’s really going off. Dam failure, evacuation issued, they’re calling it a failure," Pahinui said during a phone interview with HPR when she got the first alert about the dam.
Pahinui has lived on the North Shore for more than 30 years, and she says this was the worst storm she’s ever seen. Floodwaters lifted cars and homes. Some residents swam to safety.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 20. It was that bad," she said.
On Thursday night of the second Kona low storm, Pahinui couldn’t sleep from the stress as the rain came in. Then the next day, a little before sunrise, she said police were telling people to evacuate.
Pahinui says her home is OK, but she is more worried about others.
She didn’t feel inclined to speak during last week’s neighborhood board meeting. But when her vice chair did, she felt empowered.
"We failed when it came to the communications of alerting this community and giving them a chance to prepare and get the heck out of here," she said during a community meeting, "instead of people all literally running for their lives."
Ernie Lau, the head of the Board of Water Supply, was sitting in plain sight when she spoke to the mayor in front of dozens of people.
"I was just kind of looking over at my boss, and he smiled at me, and he just nodded his head," she said. "He knew I was speaking from the heart. He knew I was there as a community member."
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