Hawaiʻi County emergency officials learned last week that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied a request for individual assistance for residents affected by Hurricane Lala.
That FEMA aid can cover housing costs for people who have been displaced or need home repairs, as well as other expenses like child care and medical needs related to a disaster.
More than 250 homes were damaged or destroyed by Lala, according to estimates from the Hawaiʻi Emergency Management Agency. Hawaiʻi Island bore the brunt of the storm's impact.
Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense Agency Acting Administrator Darryl Oliveira told HPR that more than 100 residents are still sheltering in hotels because of damage to their homes from Lala.
But according to Oliveira, the state did not demonstrate to FEMA that the damage from Lala was widespread enough to warrant individual assistance.
"It was conveyed that we did not hit a threshold with the number of destroyed or major damaged structures or residents in the area," Oliveira told HPR. He added that the threshold the state had to meet to qualify for individual assistance was murky.
"We're hearing different numbers. I'd hate to throw a number out there, but I will try to get one for the community because that's something that going into any disaster or coming out of one, it'd be nice to know up front," he said.
Oliveira has been leading the agency in an interim capacity since the retirement of former administrator Talmadge Magno this summer. Oliveira's first official day was Aug. 17 — the Monday after Lala hit Hawaiʻi Island — but he said he was present in Hawaiʻi County's emergency command center ahead of and during the storm.
"Having that awareness of what was transpiring and likely to transpire put me in a better position for that first day to start off running on the job," he said.
This is the second time Oliveira has taken the helm of Civil Defense — he served as administrator from 2013 to 2016, leading the island's response to a major dengue outbreak, lava flows in Pāhoa and Tropical Storm Iselle.
Oliveira's contract as interim administrator is set to end in mid-November, at which point he plans to return to his job in risk management at HPM Building Supply. In a statement to HPR, Mayor Kimo Alameda expressed appreciation for Oliveira's service and said the county had "received a lot of good applications for the permanent administrator position."
Before his second tenure with the agency ends, Oliveira will be working with state partners to prepare an appeal in response to FEMA's rejection of the state's request for individual assistance. Oliveira said the state has about three weeks to put together that appeal.
He spoke with HPR's Savannah Harriman-Pote about why the state's request for assistance was denied and what he's learned in his years leading the county's disaster response.
Interview highlights
On what Oliveira hopes to convey in the state's appeal
DARRYL OLIVEIRA. We've had three federally declared disasters in the last eight months here on Hawaiʻi Island, and in some cases they were repetitive in the areas that they impacted: South Kona, Kaʻū, Puna, etc. So the impacts have been duplicative across the communities and have basically compounded the impacts for some of the families. The other things we'd like to include in the appeal process is an explanation and an understanding of the significant impact on the demographics of our community. When you look at the areas hit by Lala, these are some — with area median income, employment, economic drivers — some of the most impoverished and limited resource areas of the state, so we're hopeful that we can paint a picture for the federal government to really convey the need and importance of the individual assistance program with the recovery for our residents.
On what he learned during his first tenure as administrator that informs his work today
OLIVEIRA: So as we were doing damage assessments during Iselle, we recognized that we were sending crews out from the county to do damage assessments. We also had some of our nonprofit partners and other organizations like the Red Cross, our CERT teams, all of them going out and doing damage assessments. Yet there was very little coordination of those efforts with the collection of the information. So you can imagine a resident being impacted by the event and being interviewed or surveyed multiple times, and at some point asking the question, "When is help coming? Because I've answered these questions and given this information multiple times." So coming out of Iselle, we developed an intake system … to share that information across the different stakeholders who can provide assistance, not only to help (residents) address their disaster impacts, but, in some cases, connect them with services that would put them in a much more resilient position going forward.
On whether he feels climate change has made the job of administrator more challenging
OLIVEIRA: I would say yes … If we look at what's transpired so far this season, with the events developing so close to the island, and when I have had conversations with meteorologists, with Lala, Nolo, even Lowell, these events are somewhat unique in how they're forming, developing, and the challenges that they're presenting for the forecasters with the modeling — the prediction for tracks as well as intensity. So I think it has been said that some of this is attributed to what's changing in the environment. Even though I think it was acknowledged, we went into an El Nino season. Still, we're seeing some very unique characteristics of these systems as they're developing. I think we're all seeing that our environment is changing, and it is presenting new challenges because the models may not have caught up, or may have been finding challenges in being able to forecast what's going to happen due to the climate change.
On what he wants to get done in his remaining weeks on the job
OLIVEIRA: As we continue to discuss with the state on a process for effective case management … it's helping to develop a system that really works well for our community and have it codified, put to writing so that it's there in place for the next disaster, regardless of what changes in the form of government leadership. One of the things that I do recognize coming back into emergency management, and with every opportunity I've had to get back into emergency management, there's been gaps in my service to where I've come in with different administrations, and what I've seen is that many times, if we don't codify policy and process, it's lost when there's a change in the institutional knowledge. So, if we can put some of these processes to paper and codify it in some way, then we're not constantly rebuilding what was there once before at the expense of our residents who are struggling coming out of a disaster.
