TVR boom complicates Hanalei’s recovery

Comparisons have been made between the devastation of the recent Kauai floods and the destruction wrought by Hurricane Iniki in 1992. Some people said this flooding is worse, particularly in the way it altered the landscape and destroyed infrastructure in concentrated areas on the island.

Iniki affected all of Kauai, and the winds pummeled anything upright: trees, two-story houses, utility poles. However, the force of a flood hits at ground level, sweeping away everything right at the root.

“I’ve lived here all my life — born and raised. This is the worst,” Mayor Bernard Carvalho said.

It’s hard to imagine that Kauai went through Iniki without social media. There were no cellphones or digital cameras to document the damage or to call out for help. Many homes on the island didn’t even have phone service after the hurricane. Many homes didn’t even have roofs.

One big difference between then and now is the proliferation of TVRs, or transient vacation rentals — the sort of accommodations listed on websites like Airbnb and VRBO.

The images of those multimillion-dollar houses built on poles along Hanalei Bay, the ones now bent and broken by the flood, have become familiar in the last week of news coverage. They’re on Weke Road, a location that has been cited frequently in stories about the flood. According to the Kauai County Planning Department’s list, there are 42 permitted vacation rentals on Weke, a narrow two-lane neighborhood road roughly a mile long.

The county’s list of permitted TVRs in Hanalei and Wainiha is five pages long with just over 200 houses. Add to that the illegal vacation rentals and all the visitors in them who were on the Hanalei side of the bridge when the floodwaters came.

That changes things during a disaster.

While residents need to assess and salvage, the people who were vacationing in those homes during the flood just want to go home. Because the roads were inaccessible, they couldn’t drive out of Hanalei and head to the airport. They had to be rescued by boat, taken to higher ground in Princeville or Kilauea and then figure out a way to the airport.

During Iniki, while there were bed-and-breakfasts on Kauai, there weren’t many TVRs, which are often homes where the owner does not live on site. During Iniki, tourists staying in Kauai hotels had the resources of the hotels — staff and corporate structure — to help them get out of the mess and get on a plane for home. It’s different when a visitor facing a crisis is renting a house for a week and the owner lives elsewhere. How many tourists were staying in TVRs on the Hanalei side of the bridge during the flooding? There is no registry for that.

Rescue efforts, food supplies and shelter had to be shared by residents and tourists alike, and while that may be inspiring, it is also taxing on all involved.

What’s happening in Hanalei is easier to see because it’s so concentrated, but the same conversion of neighborhoods to vacation rentals is happening on Oahu. Hotels are efficient at taking care of guests and then getting them out en masse so recovery resources can focus on residents. How do we handle thousands of wandering couch surfers whose rental cars or Bikis are swamped?

Like in post-Iniki days, residents in Kauai’s hardest-hit areas now have an opportunity to evaluate what rebuilding will bring, how to live within the new normal and what sort of vision for Hanalei will rise up from the mud.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.