County workers are piecing together a flood-damaged road shoulder on Kuakini Highway in Kailua-Kona — again.
As crews with the Department of Public Works and the Department of Water Supply reburied an exposed water main and prepared to repave, they shared a common feeling with residents who have had varying impacts from flash flooding over the past few weeks: Hopefully this won’t happen again.
“We just need a few days without rain to make this complete,” said DPW project supervisor Henry Cho.
Workers closed off one lane of traffic on Tuesday to fill in deep trenches cut by the flooding and to prepare to lay blacktop and create a drainage swale on the shoulder. The single-lane closure is likely to continue into the early part of next week, Cho said.
DPW had been prepared to lay blacktop over previous flood repairs when the Sept. 15 flood struck.
“It just took all the work we did,” Cho said. “It actually made the trenches deeper.”
On Plumeria Road, Nat and Sheryl Giesbrecht still don’t know how or if they are going to rebuild their flood-damaged home. They are drying out the home and have removed soaked drywall, but they may need to gut the home to the ceiling.
“If we’re going to have to strip the house down to the studs, we have to look at whether it’s worth rebuilding and how to recoup our losses in the best way,” said Sheryl Giesbrecht. “We can’t abandon it, but we won’t be living here for a long time. It’s going to be a long haul.”
It also remains unclear to the couple if they should expect more such flooding in the future. Residents who have spent a lifetime in Kailua-Kona know that flash floods occasionally rage through the area. But even residents who have spent several decades in West Hawaii say they have never seen anything like the past few weeks.
Mary Robblee, a conservation assistant with the Kona Soil and Water Conservation District, planned to help the Giesbrechts scout the floodway that runs past Plumeria this week to try to understand what is happening in the drainage. The Giesbrechts and neighbors who also had yards and homes inundated would like to determine if the flood’s course had somehow been redirected by development up mauka.
Robblee said that roads and rooftops play a large role in flooding because they prevent water from absorbing into the soil.
When rain falls at an inch an hour, storm runoff systems may be able to handle the flow, she said, but an inch every 15 minutes is another story.
“When they got clobbered on (Sept. 15), the rain was falling at two to four inches an hour,” she said.