Molokaʻi resident Pulama Lima gathered her ʻohana for a mission. Her grandmother's grave, along with many others at Kapaʻakea Cemetery, was severely damaged during recent heavy rain and flooding.
“Very, very sad to see the state that the cemetery is in, and just the heaviness, I guess, of the impacts the flooding has had, not only to the living, but also to our kūpuna and our ʻohanas,” she said.
The discovery prompted concern among many families.
“There are lots of graves that have been sunken in, lots of headstones that, for whatever reason, are, you know, in disrepair, cement slabs that are broken, and some graves, you know, sunken in at least 3 to 4 feet,” Lima explained.
Resident Eugene Santiago said he was shocked when he visited Kapaʻakea Cemetery, describing it as a “final straw” with flooding damages.
“People working in the mud day and night, just to kind of clean up their place, you know, and then to come down here and to see more added damage,” he said. “I guess it kind of just elevated the emotions even more.”
Kapaʻakea Cemetery, just east of Kaunakakai, is managed by Maui County, but families have traditionally cared for their own burial plots.
Santiago said a lot of families no longer live on Molokaʻi to take care of the gravesites, but he hopes spreading the word will prompt ʻohana to come out.
Many families already did.
“As I'm looking around, it's going to take a while, but seeing the community come together, especially on a beautiful day like this, is very heartwarming,” Santiago said.
Lima and her ʻohana, among many others, weed-whacked around the area. They carried bins of soil and raked it over their family members’ sunken graves.
Molokaʻi resident Kata Lee stood by the edge of her older sister’s burial.
“Seeing it in a picture or imagining what it could be like is different than being here. It hits hard,” she said, her voice full of emotion. “I told my kids, we need to go, because she does not deserve this.”
In the past week, Lee’s sister’s granite gravestone sank several feet, and portions of the gravesite itself had holes as deep as 5 feet below ground level.
“I think we all got a long road ahead of us in just taking care, but also understanding like the impact and how we can prevent it from happening again in the future,” she said.
The cemetery’s earliest graves are from the early 1900s, and it contains over 1,300 burials, according to the Maui County Department of Public Works.
Molokaʻi nonprofit Ka Ipu Makani Cultural Heritage Center, led by Lima, conducted a site survey and found that about 200 graves were impacted, with varying degrees of damage.
“This is a very old graveyard, so I'd suspect at this point, the integrity of some of the burial materials might not be as strong,” she said.
A normally dry riverbed next to the cemetery experienced a massive overflow during the recent Kona low storm, flooding homes across the highway. But county staff said the impact on the graves was likely from torrential rain oversaturating the soil during the back-to-back storms.
The county said heavy rainfall can cause settling of the soil, but the severity of recent storm impacts has never been experienced before. Other cemeteries have similar impacts to a lesser degree, according to the county.
Molokaʻi Councilmember Keani Rawlins-Fernandez said the county had to wait for the ground and the dirt access road to dry out before starting repair work on the cemetery.
“While the impacts from the flash flooding caused by the back-to-back Kona low was unlike any other in recent memory, it was incredibly heartwarming to see the place abuzz with love being poured into our ʻohanas' resting place,” Rawlins-Fernandez said.
Out of respect for families and their loved ones, the county is asking the general public not to visit Kapaʻakea Cemetery while recovery efforts are underway.
Safety is also a concern.
Lima cautioned families coming to check their ʻohana’s graves to be careful.
“It does raise the question of what is happening underneath,” she said, “and the safety concerns for this entire area.”
This week, the county Department of Public Works is providing soil to fill in graves and support families who are not able to make repairs themselves.
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