We traveled around the island on Sunday, including another visit to Poipu Beach Park. If we’d looked only toward the ocean, it would have been easy to think Kauai was much farther along than it is.
Turn inland, and the picture changed completely. Poipu Beach Park was trashed, heavy equipment worked through piles of debris, and sand had been pushed roughly halfway from the normal beach toward the hillside and highway, as you’ll see in our lead photo. Brennecke’s was still standing, but water had reached the downstairs area, while excavators and cleanup crews worked only yards from a beach that already looked ready for vacation photos.
Lowell wrecked some places, barely touched others, and left very different amounts of work behind. Nearly a week later, even the people charged with guiding visitors don’t have one answer about when they should return, while conditions on the ground make clear why that’s so difficult.
Kauai officials and visitor-industry representatives are scheduled to meet Tuesday morning to discuss their messaging about what comes next for visitors. The situation is becoming critical due to the importance of tourism to Kauai and its residents. Discussions are now including potential layoffs and other catastrophic financial measures. We’ll update this as we learn more.
Power is back for most of Kauai, but not everyone.
About 81% of KIUC member accounts had electricity restored by Sunday, but many still lacked service. Some of the remaining work is in parts of Kauai where access and damage make repairs much harder, and some of those outages may not disappear nearly as quickly as the first ones did.
Outside help has arrived in force. About 100 additional workers from Hawaiian Electric, Southern California Edison and HMS Construction were expected to bring the restoration workforce to roughly 250 people, with particular attention being paid to the North Shore.
The video above shows a Hickam-based Air Force C-17 landing at Lihue carrying Southern California Edison crews, utility trucks and equipment. Those trucks were originally flown to Hawaii Island after Hurricane Lala and were redeployed to Kauai over the weekend to speed restoration.
Some North Shore power could begin returning in Kilauea, Princeville, and Hanalei early this week, but KIUC still has no estimate for full North Shore restoration, where infrastructure damage remains extensive. Even living here, it still surprises us what is and isn’t back online, sometimes within the same neighborhood.
Monday traffic was bad but normalizing.
We hoped the extraordinary road congestion of the past several days would begin easing as the new week started. Monday morning, it was awful again, with commutes stretching far beyond what was workable for residents or visitors. But by about 10 a.m., the traffic started to clear once again.
We’ve watched caravans of utility and recovery trucks moving along Kauai highways with police escorts while tree crews, heavy equipment, and debris hauling use the same roads. A Poipu to Lihue drive that normally takes about 20 minutes has taken as long as two hours one way, and Kauai has no alternate route when the highway backs up.
What strikes us is that we aren’t seeing anything close to the normal number of visitors ourselves, yet traffic can still become nearly impossible. Adding normal visitor volume to roads being used this heavily for recovery work would only put more vehicles into the same constrained corridors.
For someone on vacation, that can wreck a day even when the hotel, rental car, and destination are all available. Crossing the island for an activity or simply getting to the airport for a flight can become a very different proposition when travel times bear little resemblance to normal.
Monday is bringing back more of ordinary Kauai.
There are encouraging signs too. Most public schools and state offices are reopening Monday, airline operations have stabilized substantially since last week’s LIH problems, and businesses continue coming back as electricity is restored.
Those changes are happening at the same time as the recovery operation that remains highly visible. Some water systems still depend on emergency power, repair crews continue working around the island, and the places hit hardest by Lowell have much farther to go than those that largely escaped serious damage.
Our weekend report on what’s working on Kauai, what’s not, and where visitors still can’t go captured how many restrictions remained then. Conditions have changed since that article was published and will keep changing, which makes any fixed islandwide return date increasingly difficult to pin down.
Kauai also needs its visitors back.
When we were at Lihue Airport Sunday, it was nearly dead. After the extraordinary crowds earlier in the week, the contrast was striking, with rental-car operations, vendors and other visitor-facing businesses remarkably quiet. It looked to us as though many visitors had left, fewer had arrived, or some combination of both.
That missing visitor spending has consequences that ripple throughout Kauai. It reaches far beyond hotels and vacation rentals to restaurants, tours, rental cars, airport businesses, shops, and the countless other people whose livelihoods depend on them. After losing business during Lowell and its aftermath, many of those businesses need customers again as soon as they’re actually ready to serve them.
Kauai is now caught between the two. The island still clearly needs room for recovery crews and basic infrastructure work to continue, while businesses and workers in places that are ready need visitors and the income they bring.
Your trip may determine when you should return.
We’ve already seen visitors make both decisions. Julie wrote to us, saying she has clients arriving at a fully operating East Side resort, where they planned to stay without renting a car or sightseeing. They’re still coming as planned. She said that others have postponed because their resorts aren’t open or the beaches and places they planned to use aren’t accessible or desirable right now. “Each property, venue, activity, business, etc., will have its own timeline as to when it is ready for visitors.”
For an arrival in the next few days to weeks, we’d also add checking what is happening between those places, because ever-changing traffic shows that having two operating destinations doesn’t necessarily mean getting between them will be easy or workable. Though it may be.
Trips several weeks away shouldn’t be judged by what Kauai looks like early this week. Recovery has moved remarkably fast in some places, while the manpower and heavy equipment now being brought in show how much work remains elsewhere.
Earlier in the recovery, we asked whether Kauai was ready for visitors at all. At that point, when most of the island had lost electricity and basic services were badly strained, we were discouraging near-term visitors from coming. That advice was subsequently quoted as far away as London’s The Sunday Guardian.
Conditions have changed since that article was published and will keep changing, which makes any fixed islandwide return date increasingly difficult to pin down. When that changes, visitors should focus on the trip itself: where you’re staying, how much driving it requires, and whether the places you came to Kauai to experience are actually ready for you.
If you have a Kauai trip coming up, what would need to be back to normal for you to feel comfortable coming, and if you’re here now, what are you finding? Please join the discussion in our comments.
Photos at Poipu Beach © Beat of Hawaii.
By Rob and Jeff, Beat of Hawaii.
Some of the most meaningful parts of Hawaii are the ones visitors walk right past without knowing they are there. We’ve spent nearly 20 years finding them firsthand for BOH as full-time Hawaii residents reporting on travel, culture, and island life, and telling you what they mean for your trip. Join us →
Get Breaking Hawaii Travel News
