With recovery efforts in full swing after the back-to-back storms, stories about how the community sprang into action are continuing to circulate.
Waialua horse trainer and ranch owner Tyler Smith shared his own story: It was just before midnight last Friday when his phone buzzed with an alarm about imminent flooding.
He’d been wracked with anxiety about the impending second Kona low all day that day, and when that alarm sounded, he immediately drove to Dillingham Ranch to check on his horses.
When he arrived, he was met by a disaster scene that only got worse by the minute.
Smith joined HPR to share his tale of rescue, resilience, and recovery.
“I get to the paddocks, I open my door, and water starts filling into the cabin of my truck,” Smith said, recalling the immense flooding.
“I then call another friend of mine, who has two horses adjacent to the one that I'm responsible for, I call her and say, ‘Oh, are your horses in their paddock?’ And she's like, yeah. And I was like, well, we need to get them out. And then at that point, I just had to put my phone down and start working.”
Smith and other horse owners waded through chest-deep waters to save their horses from their submerged paddocks and transfer them to safer shelters.
“When I got there, it was definitely something I'll never forget. There's nobody there. I drive up into a disaster scene that nobody knows about, starting off alone,” Smith recounted.
But he wasn't alone for long — Smith credits the success of the rescue to the community around him pulling together in a moment of crisis. Everyone took action, from the ranch owners who came to their horses’ rescue to Smith’s friends who deployed their construction equipment to pull cars out of the flooded streets.
“Really, there's only one story to tell about this whole situation, you know, in the broad sense, and that was the community coming together and really mobilizing in a way that I've never seen before,” he said. “Everybody immediately took action. And just the amount of people and the amount of sacrifice that has been shown to help everybody here has been amazing.”
This story aired on The Conversation on March 27, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
