With a little help, East Oahu cleans up after flash flood wallops area

Marines mopped up at a high school, volunteers scrubbed a church and homeowners pulled busted appliances to the street Monday as an East Oahu neighborhood continued to recover from Friday’s flash flood.

Pastor Tim Mason of Calvary by the Sea is remaining positive despite the flood, which caused extensive damage to the church grounds.

“It brought the community together,” Mason said Monday as volunteers, teachers and restoration crews cleaned the mess at 5339 Kalanianaole Highway. “What’s really cool is my phone has been going off the hook with people saying, ‘How can we help?’ That’s the aloha here.”

Eleven Marines provided some muscle for the cleanup at the Honolulu Waldorf High School, clearing water and thick mud from the grounds. Classes for the 60 students were canceled for the week.

“It’ll be a while until we know (how much the repairs will cost),” said School Chairwoman Hillary Godwise, who was clad in rubber boots as she helped Monday.

Residents of about a dozen homes on nearby Papai Street piled damaged furniture and appliances on their front lawns as they cleared their homes of items destroyed by floodwaters.

Godwise contacted a Marine friend to help with cleaning up the Waldorf school. He rallied about 10 fellow Marines from Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Base Hawaii to help remove salvageable equipment from various classrooms to the school auditorium.

At Calvary by the Sea, the flood brought at least 2 feet of water to the grounds, damaging offices, a food pantry, Montessori School and multipurpose room, leaving an inch of mud in its wake. Water also entered the church basement, ruining all the Christmas and Easter decorations and theater props.

The Lutheran church’s Montessori School, which has about 60 students from toddler age to preschool, is shuttered and will remain so until a new location can be found. The school’s classroom carpet was ruined, along with furnishings — and the playground and garden outdoors — submerged.

The church is also home to the Angel Network Charities food pantry, which gave out food to an estimated 3,000 individuals a month. It is now out of operation. Freezers in the storage house were floating, according to Mason, and donated food items up to 18 inches off the ground had to be thrown away.

Mason, a Hawaii Kai resident, learned of the flooding late Friday night, and on Saturday morning he rushed to City Mill to buy a pump and other supplies, then waded through heavy traffic, arriving 2-1/2 hours later to find volunteers already cleaning up the mess.

The Saturday sunset worship had to be canceled, but the congregation still showed up for the Sunday morning services at 7:30 and 10 a.m. By Monday much of the mud was cleared, and a wedding was going on in the sanctuary, as scheduled.

“We can’t cancel a wedding,” he said.

Mason estimated the damage as upward of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While Mason has been concerned about the property’s eroding shoreline and sea level rise, he was completely blindsided by the flood of water coming from the mauka side. In his 14 years as pastor of the church, Mason said he has never seen flooding of this extent, including in 2011, when an earthquake in Japan caused tsunami waves in Hawaii, and water entered the sanctuary.

The mess the floods left behind will take some time to clean up, but the church will continue to hold services for the congregation of about 400. Still, the church needs all the help it can get. “We need donations,” said Mason.

Jennifer Jones, who resides in a home at 5329 Papai St., said she was in her living room when she saw a flash flood alert on television.

From the moment she heard the alert, she estimated the entire house flooded in less than 10 minutes. “It was just so fast.”

“It was like an aquarium,” she said of the interior of the home.

Rising floodwaters caused a full-size refrigerator on their backyard patio to float, prompting Jones and her housemates to shut off the circuit breaker and escape through a side door that led to the garage.

Jones, who is 5-foot-4, held her hand against her hip as she described the water level when she waded through the garage and safely escaped the home.

Jones and her boyfriend, John Romero, stayed at a friend’s Waikiki apartment Friday night. The couple is staying at the Queen Kapiolani Hotel for several days until they find another place to live.

Piece by piece, the couple and other housemates removed damaged furniture that included a dresser drawer, chairs and other items and piled it in their front yard.

“We pretty much lost everything,” she said.