Latest / The One Oʻahu Podcast with Mayor Rick Blangiardi / Mayor Blangiardi on the recent Kona Low storms and next steps the City is taking to help residents recover

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Mayor Blangiardi on the recent Kona Low storms and next steps the City is taking to help residents recover · The One Oʻahu Podcast with Mayor Rick Blangiardi

0:14
Welcome to the One Oahu podcast.
0:16
I'm your host, Brandi Higa, and today is Thursday, April 16th, 2026.
0:22
We're catching up this week with Mayor Rick Blangiardi, and it's been a difficult
0:25
few weeks, really, for the City and County of Honolulu.
0:29
Our emergency operations center activated for most of that time.
0:33
But right now, mayor, this week, what is your message for Oahu residents?
0:37
Well, first of all, it's been almost five weeks, and no reason
0:40
why I say that is because everybody's endured five weeks.
0:43
You know, it's been very tiresome.
0:45
My messages to, to tell people, first and foremost,
0:48
we're grateful for all the cooperation we got from the community.
0:52
The fact that we didn't lose anybody we had no fatalities is pretty much
0:55
a miracle, given the amount of rain that came and the length of the storm
1:00
and all that it brought, because there were some areas
1:02
where people were really put in perilous conditions.
1:04
So I'm very grateful for that.
1:07
We understand for a while there's a long road ahead.
1:09
I was just out this week in Wailua.
1:12
We have a couple of community assistance centers going out.
1:14
People need money.
1:16
That money will most likely come from the federal government, from FEMA.
1:19
The kinds of money that they're asking for.
1:22
But we are approval for that.
1:24
This is typically sort of reimbursed, but maybe the governor's
1:27
going to do something to help because it really seems to be a function of money.
1:31
So just ask everybody to, stay strong.
1:34
Don't give up hope.
1:35
There's plenty of resources out there.
1:38
We're trying to help people in every way we can.
1:40
And, you know,
1:42
this is a tough one, and we all go through it and,
1:46
I'm really proud and proud of our first responders for incredible work.
1:51
HPD really led the way, but everybody was working really hard.
1:54
Our city crews, Department of Environmental Services and everything
1:57
that they did, the facilities and maintenance and work with the state.
2:01
Tremendous. Tremendous work.
2:04
You know, having been out there right after the storm concluded
2:07
and when the stream was really still very high and everything was out there.
2:11
The trip this week, it's hard to, you know, even though I said five weeks
2:14
has been very long, how much improvement over the last month has been incredible.
2:18
And we were off track for a whole week as we got shifted into doing,
2:22
you know, disaster preparedness.
2:23
And we took our took us out of our recovery game.
2:26
But, I think people can feel like they've gotten tremendous amount of support
2:30
and they see it.
2:31
And I hopefully they'll give some hope and confidence in the future.
2:34
For the people, especially the white low.
2:36
But on the whole, nature of the farmers of the Kahuku, you know,
2:41
up and down that hillside
2:42
white I not actually, you know, everybody felt it.
2:46
The first thing you mentioned was community coming together.
2:49
And I want to get your reaction because, I mean, like you said,
2:52
neighbors helping neighbors shovel mud out of their driveways.
2:55
These resource hubs started popping up everywhere.
2:58
Folks can get everything from food to cleaning supplies, things like that.
3:02
Just your reaction to that community effort.
3:04
And I think it really showed who we were as people.
3:06
You know,
3:07
we had two incident management teams come in here and 14 from New York,
3:11
New York Fire Department.
3:12
These guys fly all over the country as an incident management team.
3:15
They're sort of on call,
3:17
kind of really famous, nationally brilliant guys, really impressive.
3:21
And then another group from South Carolina, seven of them.
3:24
So all in all, we had 21.
3:26
What's interesting me interesting to me in my conversation with them
3:30
when just before they,
3:31
they both departed back to the mainland after being here for quite some time.
3:35
They were blown away with the strength of our community.
3:37
They said, you know, they see different things
3:39
in different places, but it was so different here.
3:41
It could be you could feel it. You could see it.
3:44
And, and they were just,
3:48
they found that remarkable
3:49
as I do, as I do before the storm, as I always have.
3:53
One of the things I've loved about living here is it is our people
3:56
and who we are as a people.
3:58
And this is just one of the really sad things that happened to us.
4:01
But again, we didn't lose anyone.
4:04
So everything else now is a function of time and money and we'll go forward.
4:07
We're going to we'll get through this.
4:09
I know you were back out in Waialua this week, and as you record
4:13
this episode, there are still lots in Waialua.
4:16
Why can't it be in parts of leeward Oahu still dealing with flood
4:19
water on their property?
4:20
What kind of next steps are we taking as a city?
4:23
Well, you know,
4:25
we're going to
4:26
just continue with the with the cleaning.
4:29
I actually, was at the stream and see how much more they're excavating.
4:32
It's probably going for another 3 to 4 weeks.
4:34
I talked to the sniffer and, from the Department of Transportation
4:37
and one of my Masuka, deputy from facilities maintenance.
4:40
They've done a tremendous amount of excavation there.
4:43
It's just a just complete cleanup, you know, and in some cases,
4:47
with the water ponding, as best I know,
4:51
they just has to kind of just sort of dry up,
4:53
you know, unfortunately, the sun's come.
4:55
It's come back out. It's really hot. We out there?
4:58
It was really hot.
4:59
That'll help with some of those conditions.
5:02
We just we just got to kind of wait.
5:03
How we,
5:04
you know, the University of Hawaii posts a report of their first two storms.
5:08
And because they measure this stuff, you know, they've got all those.
5:11
And, I don't know how many people know this number.
5:13
And it seems incredulous, but, they said in the first two,
5:17
statewide, we had 2 trillion gallons of water on this, two tree.
5:22
I never heard a number like that before.
5:24
In fact, they actually convert it to liters
5:26
and said it was 7.5 trillion liters.
5:29
That's a tremendous amount of rain.
5:31
And some places just got so super saturated, it's
5:34
amazing that, well, we had some spill over,
5:37
and our dams, they held up, you know, for the most part, they held up.
5:42
They really they did really well.
5:45
We had some streams, obviously we understand now.
5:48
And just this week I was talking to the guys
5:50
and there's been some things written about it.
5:52
Part of what caused this was, aside from, the fact we get this
5:57
tremendous amount of rain, you know, a lot of the land
6:01
that used to be, dulled the properties, especially that were really maintained.
6:06
There were people understanding irrigation ditches and all kinds of other things.
6:11
People didn't take care of them the same way.
6:13
And so you had this tremendous watershed moment where the clouds
6:16
were up against the mountains, the water coming down the mountains
6:19
like rivers coming down, and really nothing, nothing in its way.
6:23
And you even absorb it.
6:24
So we've learned a lot is opportunity now for us to amend some of those things and
6:29
lessons learned and,
6:32
not that easily done.
6:33
I think
6:33
the state I talking
6:34
to, Ed,
6:34
we're going to have to take over a couple of places
6:36
because if we leave it with private people,
6:38
they're not going to be able to they're not going to do it, you know.
6:41
And so this is a big wake up call.
6:43
It is like
6:44
I'll say to from an event standpoint, I mean, nobody can predict the future.
6:47
And somewhere at the outset of this storm,
6:50
someone said it was the worst still in 20 years.
6:52
And I don't know that it seemed to stick.
6:55
But everybody I've talked to and the communities talking to people
6:59
who've been out there their whole lives close to my age, which is eight decades.
7:05
So they never seen anything like this before.
7:06
And I just, I just reference that to trillion gallons of water.
7:09
I mean, this is an incredible water event.
7:11
Fortunately, it wasn't a wind event.
7:13
For the most part, it would keep power.
7:16
But there's no question a lot of damage.
7:18
And, you know, and one of the areas, candidly speaking, the homes, either
7:22
all protection homes or,
7:24
you know, they didn't have the evacuating of the height, whatever.
7:26
And so they really they felt so we had, 23 homes lost completely,
7:32
I think another 89, the major repair and about 1400 that are,
7:38
that are need repair is according to the FEMA assessment.
7:41
We did so all.
7:42
And when you add those up, about 16, 1700 homes,
7:46
families, maybe even more than one family, some of these homes of people
7:49
whose lives have been really disrupted,
7:51
then you have the whole thing with the lots of land and the farmers
7:54
and the fact that they're not going to be able to grow their crops
7:57
for at least three months, and then by then
7:58
the time to harvest, perhaps another three,
8:01
how are they going to sustain themselves, you know, and hopefully
8:03
we'll be able to get money to them, because we don't want to lose them.
8:08
So, if I seem a little bit subdued right now, it's
8:11
because we're still very much in the problem solving mode.
8:14
I'm glad the rains behind us.
8:16
I'm really grateful for all the work that we've done been able to do.
8:19
As I said earlier, I think the city performed admirably, but so did the state.
8:23
And the combination of our working together really showed up a lot.
8:27
Even the even the first, the incident management teams leaving,
8:30
they they they could not say enough good things.
8:33
So these are the kind of people will tell you like it is.
8:35
Believe me, they're very much realist.
8:37
So we did a good job.
8:39
Unfortunately, we got hammered and, and in its wake, there's a lot left to do.
8:45
You had mentioned, you know, DFM they went out there ahead of time.
8:48
We did clear ditches, we opened stream outs,
8:52
you know, bought a water supply, went out to pump water reservoir.
8:55
There's a lot we did on city property, like you said,
8:58
it's super hard when it's on private property.
9:01
So is there more we could have done or is this just a matter of.
9:05
It was so much rain and just so much rain.
9:07
I think, you know, we did get a lot there.
9:08
We were out there a whole week before clean streams
9:10
open up the streams and different places that we knew historically there.
9:14
You know, before we knew the amount of rainfall we would get.
9:16
You know, there were there were two things that happened.
9:19
And to your point,
9:21
it wasn't just a slow, continuous rain.
9:24
You know, we had two different surges that really created all the problems.
9:27
The second one, the first one rose in the second kind load
9:31
that was supposed to not be anywhere near as bad as the first.
9:34
And we got through the first one.
9:36
Well, you know, we had flooding, we had property damage, but people were prepared.
9:41
We didn't have anywhere near the crisis we had evacuating people,
9:45
in several perilous conditions, where people found themselves waking up at
9:49
3:00 in the morning with, you know, water waist high in their home, all that stuff
9:53
that all happened as a result of the second where,
9:57
the National Weather Service did not forecast the surge we got.
10:01
As it turned out, we got, what amounted to
10:04
was about seven inches of rain an hour for a couple of hours.
10:08
So that just overload against any system, no matter what.
10:12
We could have done just too much water, too hard, too fast, and,
10:18
and that really created havoc and created a lot of damage.
10:21
And, you know, that was the night that, between the community
10:24
and our first responders there, they rescued 233 people.
10:28
And these were people in order to chart that that way,
10:32
they were considered to be a very serious life or death situations.
10:35
There was that harrowing, you know, and and your families
10:38
try to get out with small kids, kupuna, all kinds of things.
10:42
And miraculously, like I said, then the second one was in the middle
10:45
of the day, a surge of a minor that flooded the new on a street.
10:50
I mean, it was just absolutely incredible.
10:51
And we watched the school for the whole year local on it.
10:54
I mean, this was less than two hours of rainfall.
10:56
So when you have something and noelani which we were able to clean
11:00
up, unfortunately, again, no children were hurt.
11:02
But I did go the next day to meet with the principal.
11:05
And what he showed me was phenomenal.
11:08
He said, you know, he's a surfer.
11:09
So he saw a stream chopping up.
11:11
And so he said, oh, wow.
11:13
You know, because it was coming so fast and because the school and all
11:16
that is sort of right there by the, by the river comes through Manoa marketplace.
11:20
So he went to put his boardshorts early.
11:22
So by the time he came out, it was a raging river going right.
11:24
He said it all the time.
11:25
He's been around water in his life, I guess.
11:27
So I brought up the fact he's a surfer
11:29
is that he's never seen water like that, and I wasn't.
11:32
Then I wouldn't have said, but we've all seen in fact, even in this storm video,
11:36
we have some of the streams and just how strong the water is.
11:40
And then the other thing is that I went on a couple of helicopter rides
11:44
or requests for a couple of weeks with the fire department
11:46
and the police department looking at the damage in the mountains,
11:50
and you can just see that this wasn't like a waterfall, this like rivers
11:54
coming down, because you could see all the rocks are displaced or whatever.
11:57
Again, not able to see it as an eye witness.
12:00
It was after the fact,
12:02
all of that to
12:03
say that even if we had a few more days or a week,
12:06
we could clean up or whatever, we just got so much water so fast,
12:11
almost 60in in some parts of Oahu and in just a couple of weeks.
12:16
I mean, that's just, you know, as like as I said, that equates to incredible
12:19
amount of effect that this third storm hasn't been calculated.
12:22
It will see what how that adds that 2 trillion.
12:25
But I just don't know if we could have
12:28
totally had our island completely ready.
12:31
Especially when you consider streams are sometimes owned by the state,
12:35
sometimes owned by individuals, sometimes owned
12:38
by the federal government or private people. And,
12:43
that is incredible.
12:44
And everybody's doing their part.
12:46
And one of the things that I realized when we flew around the island,
12:49
we have a lot of streams and there's a lot of streams
12:52
is is what it comes down to you know? So,
12:56
I'm just,
12:58
I'm just proud of the men, women who work for the city because everybody responded.
13:02
I told that to him.
13:03
It's not just a leadership team, it's everybody.
13:05
In fact, I was out of the community assistance
13:07
as a story about different employees and volunteering out there.
13:10
We talk about public service or why people like to work for the city.
13:14
You know, we talk about trying to be good.
13:16
You never really know how good you are to your tested.
13:18
This is a really an incredible test.
13:21
So many people rose to the occasion.
13:22
I mean, I'm just I'm humbled by it. And,
13:26
but still hurting, to be honest with you, I,
13:29
I just know that a lot of people are impacted
13:33
not only didn't have any insurance, but they don't have much resource
13:35
to deal with this.
13:36
And so they're going to be heavily dependent on some form of aid
13:40
from somewhere.
13:42
And so that gets out because it's still unsettled right now
13:45
in the process of doing all of that and evaluating and trying to help people.
13:51
Then, you know,
13:51
we don't really know where we stand.
13:54
When you took the tour with HFD,
13:58
in their helicopter, what was the emotional response from you?
14:01
Because I know that's a whole different scope.
14:03
And you're that high.
14:03
Yeah, well, yeah, but we flew it 300ft pretty close.
14:07
That just a beautiful slope in the new helicopter.
14:09
So you really had incredible views.
14:11
Almost like being a low lying drone so you could see up close and personal.
14:15
Yeah.
14:17
And, it was just, I go back to what I said already.
14:22
I don't want to belabor the point, but it's MacGregor.
14:25
How nobody got killed or died in places people were trapped or whatever.
14:31
Because flash floods, you see it, and, you know, it's called flash
14:34
arrays, cause flash for a reason.
14:36
And we see it all the time on the news and around the mainland and places,
14:39
and people just get caught, you know?
14:42
And that's usually, you know, they see a flash flood
14:45
and then they typically announce how many people died from it,
14:48
the amount of stuff that we had going on.
14:50
And, and no one died.
14:54
So I had that emotion.
14:55
I was sitting there going, wow, look at the farmlands.
14:58
Look how soaked they are.
15:00
Look at the houses that were off of their foundations
15:03
and different things that we were seeing in different places.
15:06
And, and then again, just looking at the aftermath of the way
15:10
that one had to come down the mountains and all the other, the washed out
15:13
roads and all kinds of things, and we're still having landslides.
15:17
And, you know, I mean, it's miraculous.
15:19
We had those three huge stones in Waimea come down
15:23
that if a car had been there, it would have killed somebody easily.
15:26
It's just we're so lucky, you know?
15:28
So, but also a lot of people came together.
15:31
Like I said, the community was saving a lot of people, too.
15:33
I mean, it was this was,
15:35
So there's a silver lining
15:37
in all of this somewhere when we come out of it.
15:41
Because it did bring people closer together.
15:43
Any kind of an event like this, it was so adverse, so scary, so dramatic.
15:48
I think it's heightened friendships, and relationships
15:52
and, you know, and even relatives loving each other.
15:56
There's just a lot, a lot.
15:58
I like that you say relatives because it's almost like a family dynamic
16:02
where you can fight.
16:03
But at the end of the day, you're you're all each other.
16:05
Family blood. Yeah.
16:07
And so you didn't get to choose this from this is, you know, the residents of Oahu,
16:11
the guys like Levi, Brandon Wolf, Joey, Cadiz, rainbow, you know,
16:15
like, yeah, you formed these relationships and it wasn't always in an easy way.
16:19
No, no.
16:19
How would you describe that to people now?
16:23
Well, they said to me,
16:27
respect aside some of this, love mutual respect.
16:30
They saw what we tried to do to help.
16:33
And I respect the efforts they made as well.
16:35
And, and I could feel their passion.
16:38
You could see it.
16:39
I understood in the beginning.
16:40
We went out and got our brains beaten that night, and they would put me.
16:43
But I anticipated that it was.
16:44
And it was rough. It was hard. But we listened to a lot.
16:47
But I think we showed up right away, because that was literally
16:50
right after the storm with all kinds of resources and,
16:54
you know, and they know that we heard them.
16:56
We know that.
16:57
And we responded, I think we exceeded people's expectations.
17:01
I know I've had some some conversations like that.
17:03
So I think it's been about earning respect and letting them know that they matter
17:08
and that it is a priority for us to especially to help our people in need.
17:11
We talk about public safety, but when it gets beyond that ability
17:15
to protect like it did in this situation, people were actually affected.
17:18
We didn't just stand by and go to bad.
17:20
We stepped in and did something about it.
17:23
The decision to use Central Oahu Regional Park as a temporary
17:26
debris field, that was a decision that was made very quickly.
17:29
Yeah, we needed to do that. What went into that?
17:31
Well, you know, we knew that the landfill,
17:35
really couldn't be accessed by the trucks.
17:39
Not with the amount of rain
17:41
we had in the mud and how dangerous it was.
17:44
In addition to that, each power had gone down.
17:46
We had lost trees.
17:47
When we did have a wind event, the first one which took the power out,
17:52
we lost three big trees out there.
17:53
Had been there for a long, long time.
17:56
Cut the lines and everything.
17:57
We got that going back.
17:58
But so we were and we knew we had to get the trash out of the neighborhoods.
18:04
And it was piling up and piling up really fast.
18:07
And so under emergency proclamation,
18:10
we're able to to do that, we selected that site for access,
18:13
close proximity, if you will, especially to the Wahiawa areas. And,
18:19
we brought in a mainland team to do that because we needed the additional manpower.
18:24
And that expertise would be reset it up.
18:26
And so I never saw as still yet.
18:29
Final number, I'll probably get the accounting,
18:32
but it was in the thousands of tons of trash that at one point
18:35
it piled up and, you know, but they did a really good job of blocking
18:39
the area of of getting all that stuff is out of there,
18:42
has been out of there, for a number of days now.
18:45
And it's a remediation.
18:47
And I'm not going to say that part where we put it is going to
18:51
look like a golf green, but it's going to be back to exactly what it looked like,
18:55
which was in really good shape, really green. Nice.
18:57
Pretty interesting, to the IPO thing at the regional park.
19:01
So I have a lot of confidence in that.
19:04
They're still here.
19:04
They're going to be working for another month on that.
19:06
So that was, unprecedented.
19:10
We had to go through the Department of Health
19:11
to because we have any time to learn anything or whatever.
19:14
But it was going to be temporary at best.
19:16
So as it was coming in, it was going out, and we had all those extra we,
19:20
they contracted a lot of private contractors.
19:22
At one point I was out there, we had over 40
19:24
dump trucks going, you know, I mean, that's that's amazing.
19:27
I mean, I you've not seen that kind of activity typically.
19:31
Right.
19:31
And, in fact, just two days ago when I was there,
19:35
we had 20, 22 dump trucks going,
19:38
on a bright
19:39
sunny day, still taking all that dirt.
19:42
And then I went down a wheat circle and in Wildwood to see how much it is.
19:45
A whole field of dirt.
19:47
I mean, high, like 7 or 8ft.
19:50
And pretty big. How much?
19:52
How much of that river?
19:53
We're glad we've taken up now and is going to be used for that dirt.
19:57
And it's all being tested or whatever, but it's, you start to look at this,
20:02
you realize how much trash, how much mud and dirt we had to remove.
20:06
And, it's been incredible. Cleanup campaign.
20:10
Something else that was put up very quickly was a community assistance center.
20:13
Yeah.
20:14
You know, after the Lahaina wildfires, we saw these pop up all over the place.
20:17
It's where folks can go to get everything from like damage assessment information
20:21
to, you know, if you lost your driver's license.
20:25
But what went into making that available as quickly as possible again?
20:29
And that was again, it was another show of force of community
20:32
and the various organizations all wanting to be there
20:34
to lend a helping hand based on whether or not they could be of help.
20:37
So, you know, we had navigators at the outside.
20:40
I mean, the whole gym was packed while they were District Park.
20:42
And we we filled it up and all these tables and they were well,
20:47
man, that's where these navigators, people who would meet people
20:50
at the door and say, okay, what is your problem?
20:52
And they knew who to take them to to help expedite,
20:56
and that was going very, very strong.
20:58
And now a Hawaiian council has set up in the way the whole courthouse,
21:02
their, their assistance center, which I met the young man
21:05
who's running it, Dustin. He came over from Maui.
21:07
He ran a lot in the Maui wildfires.
21:09
And this whole thing is about,
21:11
processing claims and all that stuff now becomes administrative.
21:15
So it's just been a lot of that, you know, and everybody showed up.
21:19
I mean, we had,
21:20
you know, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, Hawaiian Electric.
21:23
I mean, I want to save it a little.
21:25
We had all these people show up all wanting to say, how can I help you
21:29
for years?
21:30
And it was for people who were in need
21:33
who didn't know the path forward, who had never been
21:37
in this situation before, quite honestly, just simply didn't know what to do.
21:41
You could stumble into that place and somehow, someway,
21:44
there would be people there who could help create that path forward and help you.
21:48
And that's what it was about.
21:49
And when you have people who are in a state of shock and despair
21:53
and angry at everything else because of the circumstance,
21:57
having that kind of help from professionals can make a huge difference
22:01
in your recovery.
22:04
And mayor, you mentioned recovery.
22:06
Sometimes this kind of disaster takes an emotional mental toll on folks.
22:11
What's your advice as we move forward as they kind of deal with that?
22:14
Because like you said, this is not just the this is unimaginable.
22:18
What you talked about Covid, you talked about Red Hill,
22:20
you talked about Lahaina and now this is another disaster that I'm unimaginable.
22:25
Yeah. What's your advice to folks?
22:27
Well, you know, I've been talking to the state.
22:29
I'm going to have a meeting later.
22:31
This this week?
22:32
Well, yeah, I think it's on my schedule, but,
22:35
we need to get some grief counselors out there, too.
22:38
We need to deal with the mental health issues.
22:41
Like I said a few minutes ago in this, I'm still dealing with it myself.
22:45
Trying to process things.
22:46
I said, I don't want to come across as pollyannaish.
22:48
Yes, the rain event is over, but we are now in the aftermath,
22:51
on the road to recovery, important from a leadership
22:54
standpoint to be strong and positive and we will be that way.
22:57
But my heart goes out because I've just seen firsthand up close,
23:01
and talk to enough people to, see the shock and horror,
23:04
if you will, and knowing that their lives have been really disrupted.
23:09
And they're scared,
23:11
and they're uncertain because they're not sure
23:13
how they could put it back together again.
23:14
You know, we got a lot of people out there, who really not affluent people.
23:19
They don't have insurance, and. And that's it.
23:22
You have to have insurance and make sure this comes out right.
23:24
But they didn't have insurance.
23:25
They also don't have a lot of financial means.
23:27
So losing what they lost is not it's hard to recover from that.
23:31
And they're going to need people to really help them in organizations.
23:36
So, and that's going to take a toll because mentally,
23:40
that could be overwhelming.
23:41
And I can understand that, you know, and a lot of the people
23:43
I talked to candidly weren't necessarily all that young
23:46
and that's what's even more difficult.
23:48
So, we're going to try to help them through what we can
23:52
and just tell people just need to stay positive,
23:54
love one another, and just make progress here.
23:56
But we have to actually deliver the help and we're doing the things that we can.
24:02
I'm I'm very hopeful,
24:05
because the governor's announced us getting the federal money here,
24:08
that we're going to be able to provide relief
24:09
because as I've talked now in this, how things shift on the road
24:13
to recovery, it's gotten down now, less about services that people need.
24:17
They need money.
24:19
That's that's coming from all the service providers who I spoke to.
24:23
Just this week.
24:24
That activities come down, that people who needed the hundreds
24:27
of families who went in there, their access.
24:30
But now the people who are coming in and looking for financial relief
24:34
of all the damage and destruction that you saw,
24:37
you know, while the fire station, they had to be moved for a little bit.
24:39
1932 a beautiful fire station.
24:42
We'll talk you can't.
24:43
You saw those homes wiped off their foundation.
24:45
Were there any stories or folks that you talked to that recalled something
24:48
that kind of gave you hope, that made you smile during this difficult time?
24:53
Yeah.
24:53
I you know, I again, it was,
24:58
it was it was just the toughness in the people that made me smile.
25:01
I said, these are tough people, resilient.
25:07
You know, I just the people, just the attitude.
25:10
Hey, but we got the we got this will heal this the way it's.
25:13
I know it's overwhelming right now, but we that kind of stuff.
25:18
It wasn't like a bunch of people walking around with their hands out
25:20
going, woe is me!
25:21
It was people dealing with the head on that, that that kind of,
25:26
that kind of strength, that kind of character.
25:32
It's really exceptional.
25:33
Really exceptional.
25:35
And, I saw a lot of it.
25:37
And as you can tell, I get emotional about it because these are people,
25:41
who are dealing with stuff that nobody should have to deal with.
25:44
But they are.
25:45
And then they weren't thinking about it.
25:46
They didn't know that was going to happen.
25:48
I mean, this whole thing came up.
25:49
Why don't you just said a moment ago how unimaginable this was?
25:52
People were living out there for years.
25:53
You know, all of a sudden their lives got turned upside down and and,
25:58
and that's when we got a lot more to go.
26:00
But honestly, everybody I talked to,
26:03
they they're positive.
26:04
I think, you know, that's where the city steps in our demonstration right now.
26:08
Provide all the resources
26:09
we can, you know, and clean up and everything else that we can provide.
26:13
Like I said, HPD did a great job of keeping people safe.
26:16
And our fire department to the rescue as it went on and EMS,
26:19
everybody chipping in, everybody everywhere, and even people volunteer.
26:23
I think that's what's going to give hope to people is the fact
26:27
that they're not in this alone.
26:28
I would hope that nobody who has really suffered
26:31
feels that they're alone, that there's people there.
26:33
A lot of people want to help.
26:34
And, you know, we'll just go forward.
26:37
Well, mayor, this is the one Oahu podcast all for one final thought.
26:40
Well, just I think it's been the theme of today.
26:42
Right.
26:44
We live
26:44
in an incredibly beautiful, special place
26:47
with, people who are even more incredibly beautiful and special.
26:53
Mayor, thank you for your time.
26:54
And next week, we'll hear from the members of the incident management teams
26:57
from New York and South Carolina that mayor just mentioned.
27:01
That's right here on the One Oahu Podcast.
27:02
Mahalo for listening. And until next time, Aloha.