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Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.
Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.
“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.
But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.
Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.
“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.
One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.
“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.
And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time.
Hawaii had been on high alert. The islands had been warned that a “large and powerful” storm was expected to bring intense winds, thunderstorms and flooding. The state’s governor, Josh Green, issued an emergency proclamation to bring additional resources into communities.
On Oahu, the chain’s third-largest and most populous island, the forecast sent farmers into preparation mode.
“This is not our first rodeo with intense flooding,” said Haley McKinnon, who runs Ahiki Acres, a vegetable farm she founded with her husband, Matthew, in Waimanalo on the island’s east side.
Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.
The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.
The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.
Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.
The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.
So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.
Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.
“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”
Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.
He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.
“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.
Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.
“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.
In the aftermath of the storms, parts of the north shore resembled a war zone, Oroyan said.
Hawaii is no stranger to extreme weather, including a 2024 storm that caused landslides in Kauai, but this bout shocked even meteorologists. Experts say heavy rains are increasing in frequency and intensity on the islands due to the climate crisis.
Oroyan and Briddell returned to find staggering damage on their farms.
Their lands were yet again submerged in water and and crops were lost. Oroyan said coolers and drawers filled with scales and supplies had been washed away to a nearby airfield, and some out to the ocean. At its worst, the water was as high as 9ft, he said.
While the water on Oroyan’s land drained quickly, the crops were completely covered, and disease had already begun setting in. The okra seemed to be the only thing to survive, he said.
Most of the trees on Briddell’s property were submerged in floodwaters almost to their tops, he said, and he expected root rot would claim most of them. He and Yim had spent every waking hour between the floods cleaning up, he said, and now they were doing it all again.
“To mop out mud from the same building twice is just pretty defeating, but we’re doing our best to keep spirits high,” he said.
McKinnon’s farm was battered too. She is confident the business will continue, but they won’t have crops for a while, and the soil has changed with nutrients washed away. “It could take years to get back to where we were,” she said.
People are still in the early stages of recovery and cleanup. The scale of the damage isn’t yet known but the reports are staggering. Of the $17.5m in damages reported so far, Oahu has seen at least $8.1m and Hawaii Island reported $6m, Miyamoto said.
The state has launched a $500,000 emergency relief fund for farmers, who can apply to receive a grant of up to $1,500. The farm bureau and the Hawaiʻi Agricultural Foundation have also organized a relief fund for farmers.
But there are fears about what this could mean for agriculture in the state. Farming has been in decline for decades, though there have been efforts to grow and diversify the industry. All the farmers interviewed for this story expressed a desire to help increase food security on the islands, which import as much as 90% of its food supply, and said they were resolved to stick with it.
It’s a tough business, Miyamoto said, particularly in Hawaii, with razor-thin margins. Farmers have already lost the money they’ve invested into their crops – few have crop insurance – and their losses go far beyond one year.
“Unless we can find resources to assist them in their recovery, the long-term impact could be we have less farms and ranches and we have less food production and ag production in the state of Hawaii,” he said. “That’s something that we’re trying to reverse.”
But community members have provided tremendous support to one another, Oroyan said, helping clear roads and land and gathering donations for those affected. Fundraisers for Oroyan have yielded significant funds that he can put back into his farms.
“There’s just like an amazing ground effort by the people who live here. And so we definitely don’t feel alone in this. If that was the case, I don’t think we could pick ourselves up from this disaster,” Oroyan said.
