A surprise ground swell gave a boost Thursday to the surf off Waikiki on Kamehameha Day, and the sea was crowded with surfers enjoying windblown, 2- to 4-foot waves.

Normally on such a day, ranks of Waikiki regulars would be carrying their boards to and from the Kuhio Beach surfboard lockers owned by the City and County of Honolulu, where the public rented space to store their boards, chained to the iron racks and secured with personal locks.

But the holiday surfers had either walked with their boards after parking their cars or bikes, or got dropped off and picked up, or rented their boards from a Waikiki shop.

The city lockers had been destroyed, along with their contents, the night of Feb. 27 by a raging fire that the Honolulu Police and Fire departments confirmed to have been set by an arsonist. A suspect was filmed on video but remains unidentified.

Honolulu resident Karen Allison isn’t surfing these days due to hip replacement surgery in January, but had been rehabbing by ocean swimming, and “I’d love to start paddling around on my 9-foot red board, made by my husband,” she said. “I trust and feel safe on it.”

But that was impossible because her favorite board was destroyed in the fire along with 524 other surfboards, as estimated in a March 6 email sent to renters by Candace Osora of the city Department of Enterprise Services.

“Lugging my big board, especially in the winds, hurt my shoulders,” said Allison, so in 2014 she rented two lockers for the $150-each annual kamaaina rate and could easily tote her board 50 feet to the water.

After the fire, “there was nothing left — not a fin, not a bolt,” said her husband, Will Allison, a native of Wilmington, N.C., and renowned surfboard shaper who has surfed in Hawaii since the 1960s. “It was like they’d all vaporized.”

Not surprising, he added, as surfboard blanks are made of highly flammable polyurethane foam.

Material costs alone, for the two boards his wife lost in the racks, totaled $2,660, Allison said, but DES did not compensate renters for their losses.

Karen Allison said she received a rental refund of $100 for each board from the six months she’d paid in advance.

Earlier this month the racks, which stand in an alley between HPD’s Waikiki substation and the Moana Surfrider Hotel, were given a fresh, glossy coat of white paint, but on Thursday the flagstones beneath were cracked, and twisted, half-melted metal light poles and burned, frondless coconut trees stood nearby.

“Repairs are ongoing,” said Alexander Zannes, communications director for Mayor Kirk Caldwell. “We should have a better estimate (for reopening) once the repair work to the flagstone is underway.”

Allison said she hoped the racks would reopen soon.

“I miss my locker and the friendships I’ve forged at the rack,” she said, adding that a friend who used to walk to work at the Moana Surfrider had lost her surfboard as well as her job.