Preparing The Elderly For Disaster: Efforts Are Finally Picking Up in Hawaiʻi

Evelyn Lane was walking her dogs last August when she turned and saw flames licking from the top of the grove of ironwood trees a few hundred feet up the road from her home.

Smoke was billowing toward the roof of her one-bedroom duplex in Kahuku Hauoli Hale, a 64-unit affordable housing complex on Oʻahu’s North Shore for seniors and people with disabilities.

“I started running, dragging my dogs, shouting at the top of my lungs, ‘Fire, fire, call 911, call 911,’” Lane recalled.

Firefighters showed up quickly, and managed to knock the blaze down in about an hour.

But Lane, 67, couldn’t shake the fear and the questions the fire left in its wake: Were she and her elderly neighbors prepared for a disaster? How would they evacuate and to where? What would they bring? What would happen in the days to follow?

The answer was as clear as the flames had been: they were not prepared.

“I don’t think the community really knows how vulnerable we’ve become,” she said as she walked around Kahuku, pointing out run-of-the-mill problems she now sees as looming threats: generators that could spark a fire, abandoned cars and lunch wagons that she terms “bombs in waiting,” a hedgerow that grew over a former exit from the complex, leaving just one road in and out.

“It’s hard to sleep at night sometimes, worrying,” she said.

‘More Likely To Perish’

Lane’s assessment that her elderly neighbors are poorly prepared resonates widely in Hawaiʻi, where 1 in 5 residents is over 65, as climate change makes natural disasters more frequent and fierce, and hurricane season gets underway.

Researchers know disasters kill the elderly at higher rates – a finding consistent from hurricanes to wildfires to heatwaves. That lesson struck cruelly home in the Lahaina fire, where two-thirds of the 102 people known to have died were over age 60.

The state’s licensed nursing homes are required to have disaster plans in place that are approved by the Department of Health. But that’s not the case for independent senior housing projects such as Lane’s, or the 34-unit Hale Mahaolu Eono in Lahaina where seven residents died in the blaze. There are about 100 such housing complexes in the state for low income seniors, with nearly 7,000 units between them.

Advocates for the elderly say special attention needs to be paid to their specific needs and circumstances in the event of a disaster – whether that’s reduced mobility, reliance on medical equipment, living alone, as 1 in 5 of Oʻahu’s seniors do, dementia, or limited access to transportation.

“It’s not because they’re special compared to everyone else but because kūpuna and those with certain disabilities are much more likely to perish in a disaster,” said Keali’i Lopez, state director of AARP Hawaiʻi. “How do we take action now and begin working with kūpuna and their caregivers, their extended family, their network, to be prepared?”

Lopez said county emergency management agencies are starting to address that question. For instance they are starting to work with AARP to coordinate emergency training webinars for property managers to develop emergency plans and involve residents in their planning. But more needs doing.

“Those needs are critical because it’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all,” Lopez said. “The steps that one would take for the broader general public to ensure their safety will be different for someone who has physical or mental challenges. Our concern is that that’s not being considered, discussed or really included in planning.”

One particularly worrying note, she said, was that despite the number of elderly fatalities, a Maui County report that analyzed the 2023 wildfires had “nothing specific to people who are older, people who might need care, people who have disabilities.”

Indeed, Maui County’s “After-Action Report,” released in December 2024, contains no mention of kūpuna.

The 62-page “Lahaina Fire Forward-Looking Report” released this January and produced for the by the Fire Safety Research Institute, an independent agency, did contain one specific reference to the elderly.

Noting that lapses in communication and coordination may have led to inefficiencies in evacuating residents, it recommended “specific evacuation plans for vulnerable populations, including the elderly, disabled, and those without transportation, should be created, with community support networks established to assist these individuals during evacuations.”

Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator Amos Lonokailua-Hewett said his agency has taken steps such as hiring an outreach specialist in April to focus on disaster preparedness with groups including kūpuna, and is collaborating with the county office on aging.

Since April, agency staff have met with leadership at senior housing groups – the Paukukalo Homestead Association and Hale Mahaolu, which operates 10 facilities on Maui – to prepare disaster and evacuation plans.

Also, the agency is currently updating 23 county emergency plans that are due by the end of the year, Lonokailua-Hewett said. They include provisions for kūpuna in nursing homes, and assisted living and independent living facilities covering areas ranging from transporting disaster victims to feeding them.

“I lost kūpuna in the Lahaina wildfire; it’s not something that I set aside or dismiss,” said Lonokailua-Hewett, referring to his wife’s great aunt. “I would say limited work has been done related to kūpuna in the past, which means there’s a lot that we have to do to catch up and build out those systems.”

At the same time, he said, his agency’s emphasis will remain on the needs of all vulnerable populations, from kūpuna to people with disabilities.

“Kūpuna is very, very important to me, but so is everybody else,” he said.

Maui community advocates who work with fire survivors said Lonokailua-Hewett, who joined the agency in January 2024, has been well received but the public has been told little so far about the emergency plans.

Shannon I’i, Lahaina program manager for Our Kūpuna, said that in all the community meetings she’s been to and conversations she’s had with older residents, she hasn’t heard of any disaster preparedness plans addressing kūpuna. Our Kūpuna delivers food and social support to seniors, many of them fire survivors.

“Maybe they are working on something and they just don’t share it out publicly,” she said. That, she said, would “definitely be a problem.”

Maui County spokesperson Laksmi Abraham said that the programs are new and getting the word out will take time.

According to a list the agency provided, it has met with elderly residents at events organized by groups including Legal Aid Society of Hawaiʻi, Maui Economic Opportunity, Maui Disability Alliance and Maui Health Systems. The agency also hosted in April an emergency preparedness expo where kūpuna were helped to sign up for emergency and evacuation alerts.

“It’s the onset of doing things a little differently and then being able to actually release that information and share it with the community,” Abraham said. “That takes some time to roll out.”

‘Top Of Mind’

Statewide, the Hawaiʻi Emergency Management Agency – known as HI-EMA – needs to play a larger role and work on plans to better educate kūpuna about disaster preparedness, said state Sen. Brandon Elefante. 

He introduced a resolution the Senate adopted this year requiring the agency to collaborate with its counterparts in the four counties to “develop initiatives and outreach programs to inform kūpuna about emergency preparedness.” The state House of Representatives adopted an identical resolution that HI-EMA Administrator James Barros testified in support of.

“I think of my grandparents, who are in their 80s,” Elefante said, “what do they do in terms of a disaster? Who did they go to? What do they know? What information is getting out there? That becomes top of mind for all of us that have worked with kūpuna or have kūpuna in our lives.”

Responsibility for ensuring people get answers to those questions “does start with the state first and then working with the counties and different community groups from there,” said Elefante, who has worked on kūpuna issues since he was on the Honolulu City Council.

HI-EMA was criticized after the 2023 wildfires –  along with Maui County officials – for having failed to learn lessons from a 2018 fire near Lahaina that foreshadowed the deadly blaze five years later.

But John Vierra, HI-EMA’s community outreach lead, said the agency is making strong headway on community level disaster preparedness, and increasingly is learning to take kūpuna into account.

No Kūpuna-Specific Plans. That May Change

The agency does not have a specific disaster plan addressing the elderly, Vierra said, but more and more it is finding that a greater emphasis on kūpuna and their caregivers is both necessary and in demand.

Vierra leads a six-person team working with county emergency agencies to implement a program to help communities across the state come up on their own with disaster readiness plans.

The Hawaiʻi Hazards Awareness and Resilience Program guides communities through a process of defining themselves, assessing risks and then creating a plan about what to do before, during and after disasters. County emergency officials can then certify the plan.

Among key questions that come up, Vierra said, are how best to notify kūpuna about disasters and keep them informed, understanding that they may be less versed in digital communication technologies; ensuring they have a proper supply of medications if they are displaced, and how to handle evacuating residents with dementia or restricted mobility. 

On Oʻahu, the agency is in contact with 16 communities, from Lāie to Hawaiʻi Kai to Nānākuli, Vierra said. Three of them – Waimanolo, Kapolei and Kapolei Knolls – have already started creating their plans.

The process is farthest along on the Big Island, which had a strong community-level emergency infrastructure already in place, Vierra said. There 17 communities are currently putting together disaster plans with the guidance of HI-EMA and a nonprofit, Vibrant Hawaiʻi.

Vibrant Hawaiʻi has started 20 “resilience hubs” in nine regions of the Hawaiʻi County, some attached to a brick and mortar facility, others rooted mainly in a plan and the experience and knowledge of the community members who created it.

Vibrant Hawaiʻi communities have identified the main disaster threats to each region, along with details such as the percentage of kūpuna and keiki residents and the degree of Internet access, and train monthly for emergencies. There’s a special focus on communicating with the county’s emergency operations center, where Vibrant Hawaiʻi has a liaison, to ensure up to date, accurate information from the ground reaches officials.

The collaboration between nonprofits such as Vibrant Hawaiʻi and the county’s Civil Defense Agency is worth emulating, said Dotty Kelly-Paddock of Hauʻula, on Oʻahu’s North Shore, a member of the Koʻolauloa Neighborhood Board who has campaigned for disaster preparedness for seniors for a decade.

Focused On People, Not Buildings

The Big Island hubs are a sign of what could be for Kelly-Paddock.

In 2019, the city, under Mayor Kirk Caldwell, formed the Ola Plan to better protect the state from climate change impacts. The plan envisioned an idea championed by Kelly-Paddock: a network of resilience hubs where local residents can go to get resources, services and shelter in a disaster.

But five years on, no such hubs have been built, although a nonprofit Kelly-Paddock helped start, Hui O Hauʻula, and the Hauʻula Community Association in May signed a lease with the state for a 5-acre parcel of land on which to construct theirs. The challenge is funding: the full cost is projected to be about $30 million, she said.

A $5.4 million federal grant received in 2024 is being used to prepare the property for construction, she said, but a similar grant was recently rescinded by the Trump administration, throwing the project into new uncertainty.

Asked the outlook for getting started on the resilience hub network, Randal Collins, who in May took over as director of Honolulu’s Department of Emergency Management, said his focus is on people not buildings.

“The foundation of the community is the first thing that we want to install, followed by the foundation of the buildings,” he said, adding that the city continues to look for ways to fund the hubs. ”Those are long-term projects that are very expensive.”

Preparing Through Relationships

Effective disaster preparedness is rooted in having a resilient community, which is in turn all about relationships built during so-called “blue skies,” periods of calm between emergencies, according to Janice Ikeda, Vibrant Hawaiʻi’s CEO.

It’s a common refrain among people who work in the field.

“We think about police and fire as the first responders,” said Karl Kim, executive director of the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaiʻi. “In reality, your neighbor or the people that are there are the ones that are first on the ground.”

For example, he said, research shows that elderly people are less likely to want to or be able to evacuate, and will need encouragement and help.

For Vibrant Hawaiʻi, that approach to the disaster planning needs of kūpuna has meant not isolating them as a group that needs help – but rather helping community members build relationships that will benefit everyone when and if a disaster comes along.

Instead of thinking “‘How do we help our kūpuna get more prepared and become more resilient, and be thriving in both blue skies and gray skies,’” Ikeda said, “it’s ‘How are we developing pathways for neighbors and community members to develop relationships with one another.’”

That approach has often led to kūpuna steering the process, she said, including leading the hubs.

Kūpuna who grew up without electricity have shown other community members how to get by in power outages  – gas cards to keep generators running are prized over emergency shelter. They’ve taught younger generations how to cook rice without a rice cooker, how to use a manual can opener, how to connect with one another when not texting.

For Hawaiʻi Public Health Institute’s Kupuna Collective, one route to building a community that will support the elderly in a disaster has been developing a network of trusted people kūpuna interact with regularly, from property managers to food pantry staff to health workers.

The health institute’s program manager for kūpuna initiatives, Lindsey Ilagan, said in an email that network can be quickly activated in emergencies to get information to older adults who are not online and “coordinate kūpuna-tailored emergency response… and (ensure) we allocate resources appropriately and donʻt leave anyone behind.”

For kūpuna disaster preparedness, Ilagan said the most important role government can play is to fund and support community organizations that already know their elderly population’s vulnerabilities and strengths.

Knocking On Neighbors’ Doors

In Kahuku, Evelyn Lane is not waiting for the government to get herself prepared.

The month after the fire in the Ironwood grove, Lane took a three-day Community Emergency Response Team training, learning how to prepare for a disaster and what to do before first responders arrive.

She knocked on all her neighbors’ doors to encourage them to do the same. Today, four other Kahuku Hauoli Hale seniors have taken the emergency training.

Lane worked with the nonprofit Hui O Hauʻula to help residents prepare “go bags” containing essential items such as prescription medications and vital documents to take when evacuating.

She is trying to organize a Kahuku emergency leadership program and establish agreements with local institutions – a school, a health clinic – that could serve as evacuation centers and maintain a standing supply of food and water and, perhaps, spare medications.

But she said the property manager of Kahuku Hauoli Hale, Honolulu-based EAH Housing, has so far declined to help residents plan for the worst. She called the relationship “pretty adversarial.”

“That is where we really need help from the city and the county,” Lane said.

Following a meeting with the Honolulu Community Resources Department shortly after the 2024 fire about residents’ concerns, Lane said EAH managers were invited to followup meetings where go bag supplies were distributed and trainings offered – but didn’t attend.

EAH Vice President of Real Estate Management Jon Pasion said in a statement that property managers weren’t told about the meeting with city staff and received “no formal invitations” but are committed to supporting Kahuku Hauoli Hale residents.

Pasion said “at our Hawaiʻi properties” the nonprofit property management group has partnered with AARP and government agencies including the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, Honolulu Fire Department and state Department of Health on disaster readiness activities such as training sessions and distributing preparedness materials.

“We’re still waiting for those things to happen,” Lane said.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported in part by the Atherton Family Foundation.