HANALEI, Kauai >> From Kauai’s picturesque north shore to Koloa town on the south shore, Garden Isle residents Monday dug out of tons of wet mud left behind when chest-high rainwater suddenly lifted boats and beds, swallowed kitchen stoves and sent families running in the middle of the night.
First, there was thunder and lightning like people had never seen.
Then, around 1 a.m. Sunday, stormwater rose so high in Steve Gray and Mary Demerin’s bedroom near the Hanalei Bridge that their 80-pound Labrador retriever, Bubba, “jumped off the bed and swam all the way down the hall,” Demerin said.
As with untold others on Kauai, the mud, mold and damage left behind by last weekend’s storm inflicted an even costlier indignity:
“We don’t have flood insurance,” Demerin said. “We’re not even in a flood zone.”
Gray and Demerin rent their three-bedroom, two-bath home immediately mauka of Kuhio Highway. The highway became a roaring river that sent a truck bobbing and left someone’s 80-pound safe in front of the home of their next-door neighbor.
Gray and Demerin, who live with two dogs and their 11-year-old son, estimate that the mud and rain caused $40,000 in damage and destroyed all of their clothes, a washer and dryer, and just about everything else they own.
But like so many others Monday who paused cleaning up to let the Honolulu Star-Advertiser into their mud-soaked homes, Gray and Demerin refused to be beaten.
“This place has to be gutted, for sure,” said Gray, a self-employed plumber. “It’s already so musty. But the dogs are OK. We’re OK. We have a lot to be thankful for.”
Next door, the carpet was so thick with wet mud that it made a slurping sound as Jeffrey — “everybody calls me ‘Pasta’” — Pollastrini walked through his rental home.
Pollastrini said the storm cost him everything, including his 2000 Mercedes Benz ML320.
Among his many jobs, Pollastrini does side work cleaning carpets, and he refused to be deterred.
“I think I can do something with his,” he said. “I really do.”
Across the island in Koloa, residents used shovels, brooms and anything else to scrape mud out of about 10 homes on Waihohonou Road and several of inches of mud on the street itself.
Michael “Chocolate” Anderson stepped out of his house on Waihohonou Road and into the storm at its peak early Sunday morning.
A day later he lifted his hand to his chest to describe how high the water reached.
“I’m 6 feet and it was this tall,” he said. “Then everything turned to mud.”
“It destroyed practically everything I own,” said Ikaika Okuno, 40, who rents a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home that he shares with his 13-year-old daughter, Nevaeh (“That’s ‘Heaven’ spelled backward,” Okuno said).
When the storm refused to end early Sunday morning, Okuno went out back to see water rising like he had never seen.
First it was up to his ankles, then past his knees. Within 10 minutes, Okuno said, “it was up to my chest, and I’m 5-foot-10. My jet ski was in the stream. My couch was floating in the house.”
His 18-foot boat “was kind of floating off the trailer,” just like his 14-foot boat.
Okuno had just bought new beds and spent $4,500 for a new couch.
“Everything in my house is trashed,” he said. “I don’t have renter’s insurance.”
Like so many others, Okuno looked at one of the worst moments in his life and chose to stay positive.
“I cannot let the stuff like this bring me down,” he said.
Next door, Dustin Pagador and his fiancee, Qiana Quinn, suffered a similar fate. But that fate came with all so many who rallied around them to scrape off mud and carry out items that can no longer be used.
“We were planning our wedding,” Quinn said. “Now we’ve lost a brand-new washer and dryer that we haven’t paid off. A new bed — not paid off. Of course, we just found out: No mo’ flood insurance.”
Quinn was in between loads of laundry when water started pouring into her house.
“We just cleaned the house,” she said. “I was just about to mop.”
With a wedding to plan but everything else suddenly in chaos, Quinn was looking forward to having her parents — William and Zaneeta Quinn — flying over from Mililani to give her a hug.
“I want my mommy,” she said.
