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Hawaii’s Storm Damage Is Deeply Rooted in the State’s Plantation Past

The latest wave of storm devastation closely tracks the regional neglect of infrastructure instituted by the state’s first modern agricultural barons

A satellite image of flooded fields and buildings near Waialua, on Oahu’s north shore.

Over this past week, Hawai’i has suffered some of the worst flooding the state has seen in the past 20 years, after a massive Kona Low storm—Hawaii’s version of a cyclone—pelted the islands with rain and high winds. State officials, including Governor Josh Green and Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, have sought federal assistance to coordinate an emergency response to the overwhelming rainfall, which has displaced thousands while rendering many roads impassable. As of March 20, the state had estimated that the storms would cost Hawaiians more than a billion dollars in property damage. Many homes on Maui, Molokai, and the north shore of Oahu remain submerged in brown floodwaters with floors caked in mud. Over the weekend, some 130,000 people lost power.

The destruction of the storm was also accompanied by the hot air of mainstream weather-and-disaster coverage. Press reports in the mainland US dwelled on the extreme, record-breaking volume of the storm without paying attention to the most salient forces that shape the human fallout from putatively natural disasters: socioeconomic inequality and the fraying infrastructure of emergency relief. In Hawaii, which suffers chronic bouts of extreme weather thanks to its geography, the human force-multiplier for storms like this latest one is easy to identify: plantation capitalism. Across the islands, hundreds of the plantation-era waterworks are falling into disrepair, posing a grave danger to human life and worsening climate disasters in the state.

One key pressure point in this past week’s storm was the Wahiawā Dam and reservoir on the North Shore of Oahu, the largest such facility in the state. On Friday at 5:35 am, Honolulu officials sounded the alarm that the 120-year-old earthen dam in Central Oahu was at “risk of imminent failure,” prompting the evacuation of 5,500 people. Residents of the neighboring town of Hale’iwa only reported hearing the warning sirens around 8:40 am. By 9 am, the water was surging through the 80-foot spillway—the release valve for excess water—as it neared the crest of the dam. During the heaviest flooding, the spillway was releasing some 1,500 gallons per second. Unlike a concrete dam earthen dams like Wahiawa are likely to give way when water reaches their crests—a height of 84 to 90 feet in this case. The high-water mark in the Friday floods came dangerously close to this threshold, with storm surges topping 85 feet. If the dam had burst, it would have released almost 3 million gallons of water per second and endangered the lives of at least 2,500 people.

The Wahiawā Dam is owned by Dole Food Corporation, one of the state’s oldest companies, steeped in the region’s seigneurial legacy of plantation capitalism. At one point, Dole owned the entire island of Lanai and controlled almost all of the world’s pineapple production. Located 17 miles northwest of Honolulu, the Wahiawā Dam was constructed in 1905–06 by the Waialua Sugar Company, which became a subsidiary of the Dole empire in the early 1990s. When Waialua officially ceased operations in 1996, it transferred full ownership of the dam to........

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