Shocking Images Of Hawaii's EXTREME Historical Flood - $1 Billion In DAMAGES, Wahiawa Dam FAILS?!

Hawaii just experienced its worst flooding in more than 20 years, and the dam holding back 3 billion gallons of water above the flooded towns nearly failed overnight. The images are shocking. Two back-to-back storm systems have dumped over 50 inches of rain across the Hawaiian Islands in 10 days. On Oahu's north shore, floodwaters ripped homes off their foundations, swallowed cars to their rooftops, and cut off every road in or out. More than 236 people have been rescued, some pulled directly from their roofs by helicopter. The National Guard scrambled Blackhawks to airlift 72 children from a spring break camp surrounded by rising water. A dam, more than 120 years old, surged from 79 feet to 85 feet in a matter of hours, three feet from its crest, and the city issued an imminent failure notice to 5,500 people in the dark. On Maui, the same neighborhoods that burned to the ground in 2023, wildfire are now under flood evacuation warnings because the retention basins holding the water back are nearing capacity, and the governor says the damage will exceed $1 billion. But here is the detail that tells the real story. The Wahiawa Dam was built in 1906 to irrigate sugarcane fields for the Dole Food Company. State regulators have warned Dole since 1978 that the dam's spillway is too small to survive an extreme rain event. They have issued four deficiency notices since 2009. Dole has made none of the required repairs. Instead, the company proposed donating the dam to the state and letting taxpayers pay for the fix. And on Friday morning, as sirens screamed across the North Shore and families evacuated in chest-high water with no electricity and no visibility, Dole released a statement saying the dam was operating as designed. This is how it happened. The first Kona Low arrived on March 10th. A Kona Low is a subtropical cyclone that reverses Hawaii's normal northeast trade winds, pulling a massive plume of tropical moisture directly over the island chain. For six straight days, it stalled northwest of the islands and did not move. When it was done, Oahu's highest peak had recorded over 26 inches of rain. Maui's summit gauge measured nearly 50 inches. Honolulu shattered a daily rainfall record that had stood for 75 years. Every official weather station in the state set a new record. Wind gusts hit 135 mph on the Big Island, and every square inch of soil across every island was saturated. Then the second storm hit. Thursday night, March 19th, the rain returned. Not a lesser system, not the tale of the first. A second Kona Low. By 3.42 in the morning on Friday, the Honolulu Department of Emergency Management sent its first alert to North Shore residents. The message said, if you are trapped, go to the highest level. Stay out of attics without a way to the roof. By 4.30, the Wahiawa Dam had climbed from 79 feet to within three inches of the 84-foot evacuation trigger. By 5.35, the city issued the imminent failure warning and told everyone downstream to leave immediately. By 8 in the morning, the National Weather Service elevated its warning to a flash flood emergency, the highest designation it issues, with language that is almost never used. This is a particularly dangerous situation. Seek higher ground now. And here is what made it so much worse. Farrington Highway, the main road out of the North Shore, was already underwater. Kamehameha Highway was impassable. Every route in or out was flooded. The people being told to evacuate had nowhere to drive. To understand what was happening, look at where the water was going. OAAU sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, roughly 2,400 miles from the nearest continent. The North Shore stretches along the island's northern coast, facing open ocean. Behind it, the Wai'anae and Kualau mountain ranges funnel rainfall down into low-lying plains. Wai'alua and Haleiwa sit in that drainage path on flat land between the mountains and the sea. And directly above them, on the Kaukonahua Stream, sits the Wahiawa Dam and its reservoir, Lake Wilson, holding over 3 billion gallons of water. The dam is 88 feet tall. It was built in 19.... 6 out of earth and rock. Not concrete. Not steel. Earth. It was reconstructed after a collapse in 1921. And today, federal dam safety records classify it as being in poor condition, with a hazard potential rated high, and a risk assessment classified as very high. Its spillway, the channel designed to safely release excess water, has been flagged as undersized since 1978. That is not a recent finding. That is 48 years of documented knowledge that this structure cannot handle the kind of rainfall that just hit it. But that was only half the collision. When the dam's water reached 80 feet, it breached the spillway and began releasing 1,500 gallons per second. That water poured into towns already drowning. The floodwaters that had been rising since Thursday night were now being fed from above by a dam that was struggling to hold. The dam did not fail. But it did not need to fail to cause devastation. The spillway discharge compounded what the rain was already doing to communities that had no way out. Here is what was happening on the ground. Raquel Achiu is a farmer in Waialua and a member of the North Shore Neighborhood Board. Thursday night, she found her goat standing in knee-high water. One hour later, the water in her elevated dog kennel had risen so fast that her seven dogs were about to drown. Their heads were the only thing above the surface. Her nephew and son-in-law charged into chest-high water in total darkness to pull them out. She sent a text to a reporter at Civil Beat. It read, We are completely cut off. Can't see a damn thing. It's so bad. She was not alone. Across the North Shore, families woke to sirens and had minutes to decide what to carry. Waialua High School opened as an emergency shelter only to flood itself. 186 people and 45 dogs who had fled there for safety had to be evacuated a second time. Bus to higher ground in Wahiawa. An emergency shelter that had to evacuate its own evacuees. That is the scale of what happened. Here is what is not making most headlines. The last time a dam breached in Hawaii was 2006 when the Ka Loko Dam on Kauai collapsed and killed seven people. That dam's owner, a car dealer named Jimmy Fluger, faced seven counts of manslaughter. He pleaded no contest to one count of reckless endangering and served seven months in jail. The Wahiawa Dam is owned by Dole Food Company. The state has sent Dole four deficiency notices since 2009 and fined the company $20,000 for failing to address safety issues on time. Dole's response was to propose handing the dam to the state. Legislation was passed in 2023 authorizing the acquisition with $5 million to buy the spillway and $21 million to repair it. The state's deadline to close the deal is June 30th of this year. And while that deadline creeps closer, Dole installed a portable water-filled barrier on the dam crest to temporarily extend its height to 90 feet. That barrier is what stood between billions of gallons of water and the flooded communities below. 236 people were rescued. Dozens, possibly hundreds of homes were damaged. 6,400 customers were without power. A boil water advisory covered the entire North Shore because destroyed homes leached sewage into the floodwater. And on Waimanalo Country Farms, the most severe damage since the farm was founded in 1948, 78 years of continuous operation were wiped out in a single night. And it is still not over. On Maui, the storm is now testing a different wound. In Lahaina, where the August 2023 wildfire killed 101 people and leveled an entire town, retention basins are nearing capacity. Crews have been pumping water through the night. Evacuation warnings have been issued for the Wahikuli and Lealeai neighborhoods below Ka Laiola. The same streets where people lost everything to fire are now at risk of flooding. Fire-scarred terrain sheds water faster than healthy ground. The community that burned is now the community most vulnerable to drowning. Crews on Maui are also searching for a missing 71-year-old woman who fell into the EIO stream on Saturday morning while trying to gather water with a basket. The river was raging from days of rain. She went fully under. She has not been seen since. The statewide flood watch remains in effect through Sunday. More rain is forecast. Every inch of ground across the island chain is still saturated. And meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Honolulu are warning residents not to relax. Tina Stahl, a forecaster with the National Weather Service, put it plainly. Do not let your guard down just yet. There is still potential for more flooding impacts. The question now is not whether the worst has passed. It is what happens to the dam the next time it rains and the time after that. And every season after that, as long as a 120-year-old structure rated in poor condition with a spillway that has never been fixed remains the only thing standing between 3 billion gallons of water and the communities built in its shadow. The state says it will take over by June. Dole says the dam is stable and operating as designed. And the water in the reservoir is still elevated and the next storm cell is already forming south of the islands.