“It’s the worst rain I’ve seen in my 45 years here and 10 years in this booth,” said Lea, the owner of the northernmost booth in the Kona Farmers Market.
Lea, who declined to give her last name, fought the “river” that formed over the sidewalk running behind the library Tuesday, bringing mud and garbage into her booth. It nearly took away one of her totes full of merchandise, but she managed to stop it in time.
She wasn’t so fortunate with a sealed box of cookies, which vanished in the flooding.
“Maybe some homeless person will get it,” she said, as no one has been able to locate it.
During the storm, she said her concerns went beyond the kava juice and other supplies in the booth. She had two black kittens, Starboy and Gabrielle, locked in her van while the storm raged. The two worked their way out, Starboy watching as she tried to control the flooding and Gabrielle vanishing for a time.
Finally Gabrielle came back from the library’s bushes, bounding through the flowing water, she said.
She struggled from about 5 to 8 p.m., when it became too dark to see. For the last hour, there was little rain, she said, but the flood continued.
She returned at 7 a.m. Wednesday and began to recover the booth, stacking supplies and scooping up mud with dust pans.
The water went first through her booth, before breaking at a barrier and flowing out the front. The other booths along the wall above the cemetery suffered some flooding. Workers were washing vegetables and scooping up mud all along the wall.
The graveyard nearby saw damage from water flowing off the retaining wall between St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church and Kailua Village Apartments. Several signs out from the wall are tinged brown, while the drainage tile at the base of the wall is exposed.
On Wednesday, Father Konelio Faletoi was cleaning out the graveyard, shoveling up the muck and trash into a wheelbarrow. Several graves have sunk and the family members will be responsible for restoring them.
The church had some water fly in through an open window but was otherwise untouched.
Small variances in terrain could lead to dramatic differences in water flow. The north lane of Hualalai Road was a river, while the slightly higher southern lane was at times navigable. The center parking lot containing the farmers market was only damp, Lea said, while the temporary Hualalai and farmers market rivers swept by.
The public library suffered a roof leak and lost one book. By 11 a.m., a worker was already working to make a repair in the metal roof.
Hulihee Palace suffered minor damage, said docent coordinator Sunshine Chip. There were some leaks in the building, she said, but they were minor. A leak into the basement, where numerous artifacts were damaged in the 2011 tsunami, was sandbagged before it could do any damage.
The flooding did, however, damage the caretaker’s home.
“It will always get the bad deal from Mother Nature,” she said.
