“It's very apocalyptic. It looks like a war zone.”
That's how Upcountry Maui resident Joel Winicki described the area around his home on Olinda Road. He said much of the forest has been leveled in high winds from last weekend’s storm.
Winicki and his wife, Jessica, who own Maui Grown Tomatoes, were on their way back to their home Saturday evening after storm-prepping their farm in Haʻikū.
“We couldn't get home,” he said. “There were already trees down, power lines down, no way to get up there.”
They tried several times to get back home to their teenage kids, but eventually had to spend the night in Haʻikū. Winicki said it was “really tough” leaving their kids home alone during the storm, with no way to contact them after their cell phones died.
“We literally had to slam our brakes because a power line came down right in front of us and almost hit our truck on the road,” he said of their attempted drives home.
Winicki said their farm suffered a lot of damage. They produce around 50,000 pounds of tomatoes annually, with each crop taking months to mature. A greenhouse cover was destroyed, and that means a big hit.
“Now everything's been getting rained on, blown,” he said. “A lot of plants are dead, and we're just frantically trying to repair that greenhouse.”
A lot of other crops were damaged, too.
“We lost 500 pepper plants. We lost a good portion of the avocado tree that snapped, and branches broke everywhere, and banana trees flying around everywhere.”
As a small farm, he said preparing for the next storm is challenging.
“Feels like we're fighting for our lives without any natural disasters, just to survive,” he said. “So you don't have extra money or time to really prepare more than you already are.”
ʻUlupalakua resident Lily Diamond and her family took shelter in a warehouse building on their property Saturday night.
“These intense, roaring cycles of wind and rain, and a huge amount of crashing, limbs breaking, trees being uprooted and taken down, and those limbs being picked up and slammed into the building and into the roof,” she described.
Diamond crouched under a large wooden table for safety.
“A limb went through a window, and in another part of the building, a window just blew in by the force of the gust,” she said.
Their exit was blocked by huge trees on the ground. They made a couple of attempts to get to a neighbor’s cement structure, running in the dark during breaks in the wind and crashing trees. Eventually they made it there and waited out the rest of the storm.
She said the cleanup of her property will likely take months.
Like many Upcountry Maui residents, Diamond lost power for several days and just got water restored to her house.
Maui County said many water lines were broken in the area from fallen trees.
“Locating waterline breaks in these areas can be a complex and time-intensive process,” said the county in a press release this week. “Crews are working long hours to navigate through areas heavily impacted by fallen trees and debris to locate and mark each leak. Once a leak is identified, crews must clear a path through the debris to reach the site, then excavate the area to expose the damaged waterline and make the necessary repairs.”
Lauren Marchand of Lapaʻau Farm described “crops in the ground getting wind-whipped, it was pretty extreme damage.”
She said they’ll be able to recover, but it took a few days to visit and assess their Olinda farm because of road closures and debris.
“I've never seen anything like it in Olinda before, just in terms of how many trees came down,” Marchand said. “Tons of debris, massive eucalyptus trees strewn across the road, hitting power lines.”
At their home in Haʻikū, they were also out of power for three days.
“Thankfully, we got power back, but it's going to be a long road to getting everything back up and running.”
In Makawao, lei shop Haku Maui was destroyed, along with some neighboring businesses.
“It was just devastating to see this tree had fallen on top of both of our buildings and just destroyed it,” said Haku Maui owner Britney Allencastre.
She woke up early Sunday morning to a call that “it was really bad.” She rushed to her shop.
“Beams were hanging or holes in the ceiling, it was still raining,” she recalled. “The front part of the workshop and my office and the storage area were just totaled, just completely destroyed.”
People immediately rallied to help.
“We had all of our family come and all of our friends and community members stopped by, strangers even, and our goal at that point was to just salvage what we could,” she said.
Allencastre had just gotten married the previous week. In December, Haku Maui was set to celebrate 10 years in this location.
“We started in our garage, with a dream, and we took a chance, and it led us to this beautiful place,” Allencastre said. “And now I'm just so lost.”
Allencastre said she’ll likely need to find a new place, and calls the loss “heartbreaking.”
“I couldn't stop crying. It was uncontrollable, like feeling of some type of loss," she said. "Haku Maui has served as a wahi pana for our community.”
Allencastre is working with her landlords, insurance, and is so grateful for the community's support.
For now, it’s one step at a time.
“Every day we're gonna wake up, and we're gonna work, and we're going to try and move forward, and find our feet again and figure out where we go from here.”
To help others or find resources in the wake of Hurricane Lala, click here.
