Reopening Kuhio Highway might take 3 months after landslide cuts off access to Kauai’s north shore

A state Department of Transportation official says it could take three months at best for Kuhio Highway to fully reopen after Thursday’s Hanalei landslide that has cut off Kauai’s north shore community from the rest of the island.

DOT Deputy Director Ed Sniffen said the agency assessed the landslide and the roadway itself, and found the roadway is in good condition. DOT officials are “targeting a three-month timeline,” he said, adding that is the “best-case scenario” to complete the long-term work on recovering the two-lane highway, working with the county to clear the landslide material.

“We’re going to be pushing really hard to open up that roadway to a single lane of traffic for Emergency Management purposes first by Tuesday of next week,” said Sniffen, adding that “that’s the best-case scenario,” weather and slope conditions permitting.

Kauai County’s mayor reassured the public that the county is working with the community as well as the state to aid Kauai’s north shore.

“We’re going full throttle” with the county’s Public Works, Planning, Fire and Police departments, and the state Department of Transportation, Mayor Derek Kawakami told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Friday morning on its Spotlight show on Facebook.

“For those people in Hanalei and on north Kauai, we have a large number of community organizations that are well established that really know how to respond to this type of disaster, that really know how to work. … From the get-go they were deployed.”

Kauai Emergency Management Agency announced Friday afternoon that “the closures on the North Shore will be maintained as officials continue to assess the damage, conduct debris removal and stabilize the slopes.”

Thursday’s landslide on the highway’s Hanalei Hill approaching Hanalei Bridge underscored the need for an alternate way in and out if the road is blocked.

The highway is also closed between Kolopua Apartments and Hanalei Plantation Road out of an abundance of caution, and DOT installed systems to monitor movement in the road.

Kawakami said his incident management team and the Office of Economic Development were working Friday to seek out alternative modes of transportation. “This side of the island is going to be faced with more of these types of situations,” he said, adding that due to climate change, similar storms are occurring with more frequency and intensity.

Many in the community have been boating people in and out of the isolated area, since Thursday, along with needed supplies into the isolated area.

Community organizer Megan Wong, who assisted after the 2018 landslide that occurred in Wainiha on the same highway, said, “We all just jumped back into taking care of what needs to be done.”

She said the loosely organized group is asking for help with fuel costs for the private boats and is accepting donations through an unrelated private nonprofit called Hanalei Initiative.

“Our community is tight and resilient,” she said. “We know where to find people. We know who is missing. We know who is in those homes.” It is putting in systems of zone captains, and during disasters the captains would check on people and report to government. She said food is being donated to the Kauai Food Hub.

Kawakami said Kauai has been looking forward to April 5 as a return to Safe Travels, but said opening commerce in the north shore area is going to be a prolonged process.

“We may be able to open access, but its going to be limited in scope,” he said.

While the April 2018 flooding caused the closure of Kuhio Highway, that situation at Wainiha was far worse, DOT spokeswoman Shelly Kunishige said.

“With Wainiha we had two major areas where the road was gone, and we had significantly more impactful operations,” she said. “The areas we shored up in 2018, they’re still strong.”

Kauai remained under a flash flood watch through 6 p.m. today.

The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative scheduled an outage this morning to make a full repair in the north shore area.

The repair will occur from Ching Young Village to Waikoko. On Thursday the outage was temporarily repaired by two crew members who helicoptered in.

Beth Tokioka, spokeswoman for KIUC, said, “We have an access road that will get us over there. Yesterday we’ve had to clear it.”

She said the road is not suitable for other vehicles because it’s not in ideal shape and is safe only for KIUC trucks.

Kawakami said the county is starting to “grease the skids” to get federal and state aid by collecting data needed to qualify, as well as working with the state for possible military assistance.

Hawaii’s entire congressional delegation also urged the president to provide immediate federal help to Hawaii to recover from the effects of the recent flooding and landslides on Kauai, Maui and Oahu but particularly “the major landslide that has blocked access to the communities of Hanalei Town, Wainiha and Haena.”