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Honolulu officials did not issue evacuation orders as Oʻahu’s North Shore flooded overnight March 19, leaving many residents to describe being caught by rapidly rising water before the city’s warnings escalated. Reporting reviewed the sequence of weather updates, monitoring equipment and emergency decisions, and found that officials relied on forecasts and limited local visibility while key indicators were moving quickly. The city’s emergency management director, Randal Collins, said he accepts full responsibility for how officials managed the flood.
City spokesperson Molly Pierce said Honolulu’s emergency operations center had been operating since 10 p.m. on the night in question and was fully staffed, including heads of the police and fire departments and agencies covering infrastructure, transportation and emergency medical care. Collins, who led the response, later described the situation as one in which officials had a limited amount of information, “vague weather forecasts” and difficulty assessing conditions on the ground because of the dark and downpour.
At the center of the scrutiny was how officials used National Weather Service forecasting to decide when to deploy resources and when to advise evacuation. The reporting described emergency management officials around the country relying on those forecasts, and said forecasts failed to adequately predict the weather system barreling toward Oʻahu and the resulting chain of impacts. A National Weather Service report cited in the account warned that there was “atypically high uncertainty for such a short lead time,” reflecting difficulty in forecasting how much rain would fall and where.
The account said meteorologists struggled in part because a Doppler radar on Molokaʻi had been out of commission since March 12 due to motor issues and would not be repaired for several days. Collins said the radar outage contributed to the “vagueness of information” officials received. Service logs referenced in the report also described extended outages in the radar during a record-setting winter marked by repeated evacuations, which the article said limited the ability to estimate rainfall location and intensity shortly ahead of the storm.
As conditions developed, the reporting tied the decision delays to a widening gap between what officials were monitoring and what indicators showed. One stream gauge near Otake Camp, used as a key indicator of possible storm flows in Waialua, rose quickly; by 8:25 p.m., the water level there had surged 2 feet in as many hours. The National Weather Service later modified its prediction, and the Mayor Rick Blangiardi said that 10 inches of rain fell in two hours, describing it as “a phenomenon known as a rain bomb.”
In communication to residents, the first flash flood advisory sent by the city at 8:52 p.m. went out via HNL Alerts, Honolulu’s system for notifying the public of emergencies. The reporting said a major limitation of the system was participation: people have to sign up for text messages, and only 11% of Oʻahu’s population—about 110,000 people—were enrolled. Residents in the low-lying areas of Waialua and Haleʻiwa, the reporting said, had previously been through flood warnings and had been told this storm would be less severe than earlier ones, including the prior weekend’s Kona low.
As the rain intensified around 9 p.m., one Otake Camp resident, Wendell Toki, described signs that concerned him while he was on the phone with his mother. He said he could smell the Kaukonahua Stream rushing behind his home, and he described the stream rising quickly, along with other indications such as a rainfall bucket filling rapidly and birds going silent. Toki said that his family had been taught to listen to animals for warning signs, and he told the story by quoting what he said his grandfather taught him: “You listen to the animals. If you don’t hear no birds chirping, something wrong. Something’s coming,” adding, “And that’s the truth. Animals know faster than us.”
As the North Shore slept, the account described how residents did not receive evacuation orders early enough to prevent serious flooding. John Sivigny said he saw about an inch of water in his yard on Waialua Beach Road after receiving an alert that still treated residents as vigilant rather than in immediate danger. He said he went to bed around 10 p.m., and later described that by the time the water reached his home it left him with little time to act. Other residents described similarly urgent circumstances; Heather Nakahara said she called 911 at about 1:30 a.m. as water rose to waist-deep levels in her bedroom and that the dispatcher told her responders couldn’t reach her because roads were already impassable.
The timeline described in the report placed decision-making inside the city’s emergency operations center between alerts. Collins monitored rainfall levels, stream gauges, reports from the National Weather Service and calls from first responders, and the account said early on officials believed things were getting more serious but not yet alarming enough to issue an evacuation notice. The report said that despite water level readings near Otake Camp rising rapidly—approaching a level the stream would begin to flood—the city did not issue an evacuation order during those hours, including periods when the stream gauge surpassed thresholds and later stopped transmitting data.
Later in the night, National Weather Service alerts warned that conditions were life-threatening and would worsen quickly. A notice sent after 11:39 p.m. told people that flash flooding was ongoing and that roadways could become impassable, while saying flooding conditions would rapidly worsen as additional heavy rain continued. Still, the reporting said residents did not receive another city alert for more than two hours after the initial warning, during a period when many began trying to escape through water that had already become deep and fast-moving.
The reporting included firsthand accounts of evacuation attempts as water trapped residents or forced people into improvised rescues. An 18-year-old, Nuutea Van Bastolaer, said he decided to flee at 1:14 a.m. on March 20 with his girlfriend and younger sister after the neighborhood between Haleʻiwa Road and Waialua Beach Road went from no standing water to several feet deep in about two hours. He described keeping the group from entering through the front door because cars were already floating, and he led them through a route where water reached his chest as they moved between yards and out into the street.
As the night continued, the account said officials began discussing evacuation orders before additional phone alerts, including one at 2:22 a.m. about possible delays for emergency vehicles due to flooding. Collins told Civil Beat that officials opted to hold off evacuation at that moment, saying they feared sending people into the path of floodwater. The National Weather Service later pushed another alert at 3:16 a.m. telling residents to “SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!” and the report said Collins ultimately advised evacuation at 3:42 a.m., with directions that residents could escape to rooftops if water filled a home.
By early morning, sirens and emergency notifications came into play, alongside shelter openings and sustained rescue efforts. The first civil defense sirens sounded at 4:23 a.m., the report said, and it also described at least one siren in Waialua that was not working and another alarm barely audible. The account said Honolulu issued an evacuation order around 5:30 a.m. and that the Wahiawā reservoir peaked at just over 85 feet before a closer dam-risk notification arrived later in the morning. Emergency officials clarified afterward that the 120-year-old Wahiawā Dam had not failed, but the report said National Guard units had already begun evacuating a shelter in anticipation.
The reporting’s final sections described community anger and a meeting where residents questioned why warnings were not more immediate. At a Tuesday night gathering at Waialua Elementary School, Blangiardi told the assembled residents that the absence of fatalities reflected the actions of first responders, and he said, “I’m talking about people who are in dangerous situations, who could have died.” In the back rows, residents muttered about locals’ rescues with backhoes before first responders arrived, and the crowd reacted strongly when Levi Rita asked for apologies for the city’s actions.
Rita told the mayor he wanted an apology and gestured to officials from multiple city departments as he asked for accountability for failing, according to the account. Blangiardi replied that he was not asking team members to apologize because of what he said had been ongoing work over multiple days. The reporting said other residents then praised neighbors who stepped in with heavy equipment as water surged, describing those actions as essential to keeping people alive during the early hours.