The house that disappeared into the bay

When the ocean receded and calmed last March, West Hawaii residents were left talking about one image more than others, that of a peaked roof, floating in Kealakekua Bay.

The house belonged to Kelly Edwards and, a year after she lost it and all her family’s belongings, she’s yet to return to the state. Edwards is stuck in the middle of a legal battle involving her insurance provider and bankruptcy court.

“All my money goes to legal bills,” Edwards said Thursday.

She lives in Monterey, Calif., working to pay rent and cover attorney’s costs as she tries to get the $250,000 maximum allowed by flood insurance, as well as insurance on the items inside the home. She and her husband were in the process of divorcing when, several years ago, he declared bankruptcy. He’d given her a letter stating she owned the Hawaii house, but the letter isn’t recognized as a legal document. The bankruptcy process froze the couple’s assets, then, in April 2010, her husband died.

Edwards still hadn’t been able to clear the legal hurdles imposed by bankruptcy when the tsunami swept her Kealakekua Bay house out to sea.

The morning of March 11, 2011, she wasn’t even thinking about Hawaii or the potential for a tsunami here. California’s coast was also under a tsunami warning, but mostly, she said, she was thinking about the lives lost in Japan.

“You’re looking at this tragedy unfold,” Edwards said. “You weren’t thinking about yourself.”

Then her neighbor, Gordon Leslie, called.

“He said, ‘Your house is gone,’” Edwards said. “What do you mean it’s gone?”

Leslie told her the house was up against the pali. At first, she thought he meant the house had been pushed uphill. Leslie said no, he meant the pali across the bay.

“It was quite a shock,” Edwards said.

Then came more phone calls, these from the Department of Land and Natural Resources, demanding to know what she was going to do to remove the house from the water. Stuck in California, she said she had no idea.

“Nobody could help me,” she said. “Shouldn’t somebody know how to do this?”

Within days, it was her neighbors and other West Hawaii residents who resolved the problem. They took their own boats, diving equipment and surf boards into the bay, pulling out the debris, even the roof, a little at a time. Edwards said she’s still uncertain what happened to all of the house.

“It’s almost like it disappeared,” she said.

For days after the tsunami, the smell of rotting fish filled the air above Kealakekua Bay.

“We had a hard time sleeping because of the dead fish,” Napoopoo resident Derrick Carvalho recalled Monday, as he talked about the waves that came ashore March 11, following a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The road, blocked by large boulders, lifted that Friday morning from the bay across Napoopoo Pier and onto Puuhonua Road, was open that first day, Carvalho said. Other land cleanup, mostly damaged yards at Napoopoo, took a little longer.

Leslie said his father warned him years ago not to invest in property near the beach, because the waves would come again someday. Leslie bought the land, but built his home there a little at a time, he said, without a mortgage. The waves washed away three of five bungalows on the property.

Leslie recalled the 1960 tsunami — he was 13 at the time — and the debris that littered Kealakekua Bay’s floor into the 1970s. The real story from last year’s disaster, he said, was the volunteers.

“It just shows people taking ownership,” he said. “It’s just amazing. I don’t think the government would have been able to do it as quickly or any better.”

Edwards agreed.

“I cannot thank the public enough that came out and helped,” she said. “I feel badly that I couldn’t be there. I would like to go and have a thank-you gathering and just hug every single person.”