With city and state officials responding to the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Lala, HPR spoke with Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation spokesperson Nathan Serota to learn more.
Serota shared the latest updates from a briefing on the state of Oʻahu’s basic city services.
Interview Highlights
On best practices after the storm
NATHAN SEROTA: If you do not need to be on the roadways, please stay home. A lot of services have been suspended today, whether that's for the city, the state. Schools have been closed. Treat all intersections that don't have a functioning traffic light as an all-way stop, and please yield to pedestrians. Give them the right-of-way. There's a brown water advisory statewide as well, too, as you can imagine, with the amount of rainfall that we got statewide. The ocean conditions are not going to be great, so if your favorite beach today is brown, don't go out. Really probably not a great day to be at the beach anyway because a lot of our parks did have fallen trees that came down within the parks, and again, we'll get to those, but we are going to prioritize the more higher-infrastructure impacts or the bigger priority areas like roadways and people's homes and vehicles.
On restoring city services
SEROTA: Our hope is to have normal city services back open tomorrow, so that's kind of the recreation facilities I mentioned. That's the satellite city halls, Department of Motor Vehicles as well, too. Hoping to get those back on tomorrow, so that's what we're working towards. But we do have all our critical infrastructure that's still operating. All refuse is operating normally, so that's the landfill, that's refuse centers that pick up all of your ōpala. We do have all emergency first responders, of course, working. They've been working around the clock.
On reporting residential storm damage
SEROTA: If your home sustained any damage, please report it to the Department of Emergency Management. They have an online form that's at honolulu.gov/dem. And so that's a good way to let us know what damage happened to your home. Of course, take pictures, call your insurance company, report it to them. But this online form will help us to further declare the federal emergency declaration because damages to people's homes and to infrastructure are really what help to make that case for that FEMA emergency declaration, and we're absolutely going to file for that.
Oʻahu residents who suffered residential storm damage are encouraged to report it to the Department of Emergency Management using this online form.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 17, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
