A nervous Khamla Phonsouvanh monitored fast-rising Kalihi Stream behind his Umi Street apartment for several hours on the night Tropical Storm Darby drenched Oahu, but still the flooding took him by surprise.

Phonsouvanh, his wife and their two young children didn’t have time to even think about grabbing any valuables when, around 9:30 p.m., the water broke through the sliding glass door at the back of their home.

“It was really bad,” Phonsouvanh said, recalling how on July 24 the water and debris suddenly came over the wall that separates his small back lanai from the stream that had turned into a raging river. He had closed the sliding door, turned off the power and lights and told his kids to move to the front of the apartment. “And then I closed (the front door behind them) and not even one second, half a second, the sliding door glass broke.”

Once outside, they couldn’t get back in — pushing the door against 40 inches of water that had turned their two-bedroom apartment into a giant bathtub of mud and debris. Only around midnight, after the water had subsided, were four men able to force the door open, Phonsouvanh told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Today Phonsouvanh, his wife and children, ages 5 and 7, are living in a rental in McCully that the Institute for Human Services helped them find. The family had purchased their Hale Umi apartment only a month and a half before the disaster, and they want to move back.

“I have to live over there,” he said. “I really like it, and I don’t have any place else to go.”

All told, nine ground-floor units at Hale Umi sustained flood damage. The five families in units rendered unlivable have been told it will take another two to three months of cleanup before they’ll be able to move back in. (A sixth family has refused to move out of their unit.)

Insurance from Hale Umi’s association is expected to pay for removal of asbestos, new drywall, flooring and other repairs of structural damage to the building, which was built in the 1960s. But the residents are on their own when it comes to any personal belongings they lost.

George Atta, the city’s director of planning and permitting, said there are rules that expedite the building permit process for homeowners in emergencies, which could help the families as they try to rebuild. “If something is immediately affecting their property, they do have a right to make repairs and take mitigative actions,” he said.

Association President Joseph Aiello and his family were among those flooded out, and they are now living temporarily with relatives in Waikele. The Aiellos took the residents’ story to the Honolulu City Council’s Public Works, Infrastructure and Sustainability Committee earlier this month.

Not only are the families in need of immediate help rebuilding, Aiello said; they also want assurances that what happened last month doesn’t happen the next time a major storm hits.

Aiello said as someone who’s been around water his whole life, he realized the water was going to come over the 4-foot cement wall that sits atop the 15-foot-high man-made banks of the stream. “I saw the stream coming up, and I told my wife about 15 (minutes) before (it) started coming to the top, ‘Pack a bag ’cause we gotta go. This doesn’t look right,’” he said.

When the family returned home, they found that even a washer and dryer, two refrigerators and large storage containers had been uprooted by the water and tossed around. Aiello estimated about 70 percent of their belongings were destroyed, including valuable instruments from his time as a musician.

“And you talk about lives? The next time somebody’s gonna die,” Aiello said. “Because if this happens 3 o’clock in the morning, when we’re in the house … I had a fully loaded refrigerator on the ground — that could have crushed my daughter.”

The intensity and size of the deluge not only brought down debris from the mauka side of Kalihi Stream to the lower areas, but created a blockage at the bridge at Kamehameha Highway, said Ed Manglallan, deputy director of the city Department of Facility Maintenance. That, in effect, “created a dam and diverted the water … made Kalihi Stream overflow its banks.”

Aiello said a 4-foot-high wire fence sitting above the rock wall helped prevent a bigger catastrophe by acting as a screen that kept giant logs and other large debris out of their unit. City officials need to examine the wall and fence and make necessary repairs, he said, noting that there are now noticeable cracks in the wall. “What happens if this wall breaks?”

City crews went into the stream, which spans about 20 yards across where Hale Umi is, and cut the grass there several days before the storm, Aiello said. But they didn’t remove the cuttings, some as high as 15 to 20 feet, which added to the debris that clogged up the mouth of the stream near the Kamehameha Highway bridge, he said.

“Next time, take the rubbish out, because all they did was push it over to the side,” Aiello said.

Atta said some of the debris that came from upstream appeared to consist of man-made cuttings. “We don’t know who put them there, but they were not natural-fallen,” he said. “People obviously pruned their trees and dumped them in the stream channel.”

Neither Manglallan nor Atta addressed directly the charge about city crews leaving cuttings.

City spokesman Jesse Broder Van Dyke said Friday that it was large branches and stumps from upstream coupled with large appliances dumped into the stream that caused the blockage, not grass cuttings.

COUNCIL Public Works Chairwoman Carol Fuku- naga and Kalihi area Councilman Joey Manahan said that besides offering assistance to the victims, city officials need to reassess the area, how they prepared for the flooding and their response.

Fukunaga said “extreme weather occurrences” like Darby appear to be happening more frequently. “This is an opportunity to identify where we ran into problems and where we can do better,” she said.

Examining the structural integrity of the wall that stands between the stream and the Hale Umi ground-floor units should be a priority, Manahan said. “We’ve had rains, but we’ve never seen the stream rise to that level,” he said.

The city also needs to take a good look at what happened in the stream and what can be done to prevent the water from rising as high it did again, he said.

Raenae Rogers, another first-floor Hale Umi resident, was still trying to do some cleaning in her unit last week. “Had mud all over, all over,” said Rogers, who had packed eight family members into the unit by converting the lanai into a sleeping area for kids.

Fortunately, the family was attending a graduation party in Kahaluu on July 24 so was not home when the storm hit. But like other first-floor families, Rogers’ family lost nearly all their belongings. They are now living in Pearl City.

Like Phonsouvanh and Aiello, Rogers said she’s not giving up on her home and intends to move back. “I gotta do what I can to save ’em,” she said.

And like Aiello, Rogers said she noticed city crews cut the tall brush in the streambed days before the storm but did not remove the cuttings. “But they left all the debris,” she said. “Normally, they would clean that rubbish out.”

Rogers said she is grateful for those in the community who came out to help the families. But they could use a lot more help, she said.

Kimo Carvalho, community services director at the Institute for Human Serv-ices, said that after being approached by Manahan, IHS helped the Phonsouvanh family and two others make temporary living arrangements.

Because all three were homeowners with steady incomes, they did not meet the legal definition of homeless. So IHS negotiated on behalf of the families with landlords and property managers, who generally don’t deal with rentals of less than six months, and used federal Homeless Prevention and Rapid Rehousing funds granted through the city to cover security deposits and first-month rents, Carvalho said. A separate, state-funded program administered by Aloha United Way helped foot the bill for additional months’ rents, he said.

Several businesses in the Dillingham area, downstream from Hale Umi, also sustained damage from flooding. At the city’s Kalihi Transit Center, 25 parked Handi-Vans were rendered inoperable by floodwaters.