{"id":548010,"date":"2026-03-27T07:18:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T07:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/548010\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T07:18:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T07:18:22","slug":"hawaiis-storm-damage-is-deeply-rooted-in-the-states-plantation-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/548010\/","title":{"rendered":"Hawaii\u2019s Storm Damage Is Deeply Rooted in the State\u2019s Plantation Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Environment<\/a><\/p>\n

\/
\n March 26, 2026<\/p>\n

The latest wave of storm devastation closely tracks the regional neglect of infrastructure instituted by the state\u2019s first modern agricultural barons<\/p>\n

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A satellite image of flooded fields and buildings near Waialua, on Oahu\u2019s north shore.<\/p>\n

(Satellite image (c) 2026 Vantor)<\/p>\n

Over this past week, Hawai\u2019i has suffered some of the worst flooding the state has seen in the past 20 years, after a massive Kona Low<\/a> storm\u2014Hawaii\u2019s version of a cyclone\u2014pelted<\/a> the islands with rain and high winds. State officials, including Governor Josh Green and Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, have sought<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a> power.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One key pressure point in this past week\u2019s storm was the Wahiaw\u0101 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<\/a> the alarm that the 120-year-old earthen dam in Central Oahu was at \u201crisk of imminent failure,\u201d prompting the evacuation of 5,500 people. Residents of the neighboring town of Hale\u2019iwa only reported hearing the warning sirens around 8:40 am. By 9 am, the water was surging through the 80-foot spillway\u2014the release valve for excess water\u2014as it neared the crest<\/a> 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n

The Wahiaw\u0101 Dam is owned<\/a> by Dole Food Corporation, one of the state\u2019s oldest companies, steeped in the region\u2019s seigneurial legacy of plantation capitalism. At one point, Dole owned the entire island of Lanai and controlled almost all of the world\u2019s pineapple production. Located 17 miles northwest of Honolulu, the Wahiaw\u0101 Dam was constructed in 1905\u201306 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 Dole.<\/p>\n

Sugar cane, another of the island\u2019s main agricultural exports, is an infamously thirsty crop; one pound of refined sugar takes 4,000 pounds of water<\/a>, which is equivalent to 500 gallons. It takes roughly 4,000 tons of water, or a million gallons, to irrigate 100 acres of cane. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the plantations built hundreds of ditches, dams, dikes, tunnels, and other irrigation devices to exploit the island\u2019s resources, fundamentally altering its sensitive ecology. The Wahiawa\u2013Lake Wilson system was once considered<\/a> a crown jewel of plantation-era waterworks, supporting irrigation for the upper fields in North and Central Oahu, delivering 10\u201312 billion gallons of water a year.<\/p>\n

For decades now, Dole has consistently overlooked mounting alarms over the dam\u2019s structural integrity. Dole Food Corporation has known about serious structural issues with the dam since at least 1978<\/a>, when the US Army Corps of Engineers issued a report warning of the dam\u2019s ongoing disintegration. The report also cautioned that the spillway wasn\u2019t large enough to lower water levels in the event of \u201cprobably maximum precipitation.\u201d Going back to 2009, Dole has been cited four times for failing to address deficiencies in the dam, and paid<\/a> a $20,000 fine to Hawaii\u2019s land department for (among other things) inadequate spillway capacity, failure to address the embankment\u2019s stability, delayed necessary construction, and refusal to remove excess vegetation.<\/p>\n

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In recent years, Dole has invested in some repairs and upgrades to the dam\u2014$3 million of an estimated $15 million repairs needed<\/a> according to the Engineering Division of the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR). Yet, in line with its history as a prime beneficiary of government handouts on the islands, the corporation expects taxpayers to foot the bill, even as Dole Food\u2019s parent company, the Dublin-based Dole PLC, postedrecord profits<\/a> in 2023 with a net income of $155 million. The standard Dole strategy is to poor-mouth its own economic performance: Dan Nellis, a general manager with the company, complained that such upgrades would be too expensive because Hawaii-based operations were allegedly barely profitable. \u201cWe\u2019re growing pineapples,\u201d he explained<\/a> to the state in a 2021. \u201cWe\u2019re not growing money out here,\u201d .<\/p>\n

In 2021, the Engineering Division of the DLNR officially classified the Wahiaw\u0101 Dam as a structure with \u201chigh hazard potential\u201d\u2014the highest risk category for aging waterworks. The department\u2019s report warned that the dam\u2019s failure would result in \u201cprobable loss of human life.\u201d In the last week, state officials told Blaze Lovell and Thomas Heaton of Civil Beat that Dole hasn\u2019t made any improvements on the dam since 2023. The state has been trying to purchase the dam since the 1990s. In 2023, the state legislature passed a bill alloting $23 million to DLNR to acquire the dam. Ironically enough, the state land board was scheduled<\/a> to vote on the acquisition this week. Should the acquisition go through, the state would have to pay<\/a> more than $20 million in repairs. Unfortunately, Wahiaw\u0101 isn\u2019t exceptional in this regard; as of 2021, a stunning 120 of Hawaii\u2019s 131 state-regulated dams\u2014most of which are privately owned\u2014shared the label of \u201chigh hazard potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

Negligence in the maintenance of plantation-era waterworks has already claimed hundreds of lives. In March 2006, Oahu\u2019s neighboring island of Kaua\u2019i suffered a massive dam failure. Following four weeks of intense rainfall, the century-old Ka Loko Dam on the northeast side of the island suddenly burst<\/a>, releasing an estimated 325,000,000 gallons of water down the Wailapoa Stream. Built in for water storage for cane irrigation by the Kilauea Sugar Plantation in the late 1800s, ownership of the dam transferred a handful of times, first in 1971 after Kilauea\u2019s operations ceased, until it was transferred to a private individual owner. At the time, Ka Loko was considered a low hazard dam. The ensuing flood killed seven people, including a pregnant woman, and destroyed several structures. The Ka Loko Dam failure led<\/a> the state to tighten regulations on dam safety, and the dam\u2019s owner, a retired auto dealership owner, was charged<\/a> with reckless endangerment in the first degree in 2014.<\/p>\n

Plantation-era waterworks also contributed to Hawaii\u2019s deadliest natural disaster: the 2023 Maui Fires. Once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the town of Lahaina was the epicenter of the fires. Together with the region of Maui Komohana (West Maui), Lahaina was known for its abundant streams, ponds, and rivers. Travelers gave Lahaina the nickname<\/a> \u201cVenice of the Pacific.\u201d However, by the mid-19th century, sugar plantations across Maui started siphoning up to 1,200 million gallons of water daily for their crops, artificially worsening drought conditions and significantly changing the town\u2019s ecology.<\/p>\n

As U\u2019llani Tanigawa Lum and Kaulu Lu\u2019uwai observe<\/a> in the Law & Political Economy Project, water extraction for the region\u2019s plantations not only destroyed the livelihoods of small taro farmers but also effectively turned Lahaina into a tinderbox for wildfires by concentrating much of the region\u2019s water into a monocrop agricultural model. Even as the state shifted<\/a> from sugar to tourism as its principal source of revenue in the 1960s, water reclamation was never a priority in Lahaina. So when the Maui fires began in early August 2023, Lahaina\u2019s condition of malign neglect was a prime accelerant. High winds pushed the fires forward, and the town\u2019s long-term drought, aging electrical infrastructure, and unmaintained lands did the rest. When the smoke finally cleared, at least 102 residents were dead, and more than 2,200 buildings were destroyed. Today, Lahaina survivors\u2014many of whom are from working-class Kanaka Maoli and Filipino backgrounds\u2014still struggle to find affordable housing and rebuild their lives.<\/p>\n

Climate change has ushered in a new age of extreme weather, but the social forces that plunge affected areas into peril are largely the same ones behind the climate crisis: extractive industries and their government retainers, which remain dogmatically opposed to restoring the ecosystems they despoil for profit. In Hawaii, working-class locals and native populations are bearing the brunt of climate disasters, while the descendants of plantation oligarchs\u2014and their new tech-lord neighbors\u2014remain insulated from the harms they create. Once the true costs of plantation capitalism are measured and mitigated, we can build a better world from the wreckage.<\/p>\n

Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump\u2019s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new \u201cforever war\u201d\u2014with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground\u2014may very well be upon us.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic\u2014and civilians around the world\u2014and shine a bright light on the truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Nation\u2019s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we\u2019re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That\u2019s why we\u2019re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this journalism is possible only with your support.<\/p>\n

This March, The Nation needs to raise $50,000 to ensure that we have the resources for reporting and analysis that sets the record straight and empowers people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew Vickers<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew Vickers is a writer and journalist based in New York City.<\/p>\n

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