“People Were Fucking Swimming Out Of Their Homes In The Middle Of The Night”
A North Shore flood report from Nathan Fletcher and lifeguard Kyle Foyle.
Click here for a full list of places to donate.
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And click here for a flood relief fundraiser by Pyzel Surfboards where you can win a custom surfboard, Florence Marine X goodies, a YETI Cooler, a Stab Premium Membership, and more. All proceeds go to those affected.
“It’s like we got hit by a hurricane without the hurricane,” chuckles Kyle Foyle, lieutenant of the North Shore’s Ocean Safety Department.
As I call him, he’s in the process of cleaning up debris around his North Shore home which, luckily, didn’t fare quite as poorly as some areas of Hawaii this week.
“I live right next to Foodland,” he tells me. “Foodland kinda caught the brunt of it and my house dodged it. It’s crazy, all the manhole covers that are in the road by Foodland are blown off completely. I don’t know how much water pressure it takes to fucking blow off a manhole cover, but it’s a whole lot.”
As we reported a few days ago, Oahu’s North Shore — along with a handful of other places throughout the island — just underwent the worst floods in recent history. The catastrophe has caused the widespread destruction of a place dear to the entire culture of surfing, with hundreds of homes destroyed and countless families displaced.
“People were fucking swimming out of their homes in the middle of the night,” Nathan Fletcher tells me. As I call him, Nate is walking his dog and decompressing from back-to-back-to-back 10-hour days of cleanup at his flooded home.
“It’s all good,” he says. “The whole bottom floor of my house flooded, but I’m kinda stoked. I got to get rid of a bunch of shit that I was never gonna clean out. A lot of people had it a lot worse than I did.”
“I didn’t think it was going to be that bad at all,” says Kyle Foyle. “We had that first Kona low, and the media blew up the first one so much that we didn’t expect this one to be bad. They kept on saying there would be ‘pockets of rain’ with this one, and it ended up being way worse than the first one. The chaos and the amount of water was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
According to residents, the flooding began around midnight and kicked into high gear in the early hours of the morning.
“I didn’t even realize, my dog was jumping on me and I was just telling him to relax,” says Nate Fletcher. “Then I looked on the side of our bed and it was about four inches underwater. After I got up and checked it all out I laid back in bed and figured I’d deal with it in the morning.”
Kyle slept through much of the ordeal.
“I was supposed to be off Friday, so I slept in. I was enjoying myself. I walked out of my house and it was like a movie. I walked out into Pupukea Road in my underwear and it looked like a war zone, huge boulders everywhere — just devastation, complete devastation. I literally just walked in the house, grabbed my boots, woke up my son, grabbed the shovel, grabbed the broom and just started clearing rocks and debris with another guy.
“Then I went into work because it’s my district. We just started moving all our assets around. Everybody went to Haleiwa and Waialua. Ocean Safety went and coordinated with HFD and started getting people out. We launched a ski and went around grabbing people.That’s the beauty of the North Shore. We’re a strange little community, but when stuff goes wrong, we take care of ourselves. The farmers got their backhoes and just started working, you know?”
Fortunately, there have been no recorded fatalities. But, at current estimate, over a billion dollars worth of damage has been incurred. And, as I write this, the government has offered no notable assistance to the affected communities.
“The whole North Shore is feeling it, there’s been no help by any sort of city or county,” says Nate Fletcher. “Basically a lot of people whose houses were fine, they’ve been volunteering. The whole mountain was in the middle of the street, and all the neighbors came and shoveled it into buckets.”
“Zero help from the government,” says Kyle. “From what I know, 50% of Oahu residents are in flood zones, but only 4% of residents have flood insurance.”
For those of you who aren’t great with numbers, that’s not good.
“We’re talking restaurants too,” says Kyle. “They can’t open because they can’t serve water. We’re boiling water right now. It’s like we’re living in Thailand or Mexico, using bottled water to brush our teeth, boiling water just to drink it. They’re even advising not to wash dishes in normal water. The sewers all blew up, so we’re not even thinking about how many people are going to get sick from this.”
And, how has all the flooding affected the ocean?
“Nobody’s surfing,” says Kyle. “I mean, there’s a couple people that are visiting surfers, late season surfers, and they’re going out. I get it, they paid money to come here. But it’s like, if I can’t drink my own tap water, how clean do you think the ocean is?
“I mean, I’ll quote freaking Luke Shepherdson, Eddie Winner. I talked to him yesterday. He said he’s not going in the water for three weeks. It’s not like he’s scared because it’s 25 feet. He’s scared because of staph infection,” chuckles Kyle.
So, how can you help? Well, we’ll drop a handful of GoFundMe links below and above, but Kyle has his own suggestion.
“Give the North Shore it’s space,” says Kyle. “Let it heal. You can’t go in the water. You can’t drink the water. Restaurants are all shut down. We love everybody coming to visit here. This is the mecca of the surfing world. We love people. Tourism is a big driving force in Hawaii, but we just need a little grace right now, just a little breather because resources are limited.
“I would say look out for the links to donate — the ones that are real — and then just give North Shore a little peace. There’s no reason to come up here. The waves are shitty. It’s North Wind today, chocolate brown, two to three foot. It’s crap. Just take it easy for a second. Give us a few weeks, maybe a month.”
Ten-four, captain.
