The Kaʻū district on the southern edge of Hawaiʻi Island was among the hardest-hit areas when Hurricane Lala passed by over the weekend.
Floods tore through a cemetery in the small town of Nāʻālehu, Kaʻū Pastor Troy Gacayan said.
“Tombstones, coffins, all over the road up front, and, you know, prayers for those families,” Gacayan said. “Not sure how they're going to handle that.”
The water carried a 40-foot container belonging to Punaluʻu Bake Shop from the back of the bakery to the front, Gacayan said. But he also saw the head of the bakery had opened the container and was handing out the shop's famous Punaluʻu sweetbread.
“So there are, there are highlights to this,” Gacayan said.
The CEO of Ohana Foods, Carl Okuyama, also donated food.
“I'm also a pastor of a church, so he said, ‘Hey, we want to donate all the food, the chilled food and the frozen food to the church to distribute,’” Gacayan said. “So we loaded up coolers, just went around town giving those out.”
Joan Obra, the owner of Rusty’s Hawaiian, a coffee farm, spent much of the storm sitting on a beach chair in the hallway of her mother’s house.
She believed this would be the safest place to take refuge during a Category 1 hurricane hit because a storm with such powerful winds could send projectiles flying through the air and break windows.
Her windows didn’t break and projectiles didn’t come flying. But the intense wind and rain made her think of a scene from the movie "Forrest Gump" in which Lieutenant Dan yells at God from the mast of a shrimping boat in the middle of a storm.
“In the middle of Lala, I realized what it sounded like was a giant swarm of bees just humming and buzzing,” Obra said. “So pair that with the intensity of that scene in Forrest Gump. That's what it was like for about 12 hours straight.”
She studied environmental science in college and remembers her professors warning that “we were going to end up like this” if people didn’t reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
She said, “it's really scary to see my college curriculum come to life.”
“We live in a world now that has changed so much that I kind of feel like Mother Nature has written new rules, and now we're all trying to figure out what those new rules are,” Obra said.
Scientists say climate change has not led to an increase in the total number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. each year.
But the storms that do form are more likely to become more intense, with higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall, and more severe storm surge.
