Vibrant Hawaii Nonprofit Distributes Food, Ice and Water to Puna Storm Survivors

Cars snaked around the parking lot of the William "Billy" Kenoi District Park Gym on Kauhale Street in Pāhoa on Wednesday afternoon, their drivers waiting for volunteers to load them with ice, food and drinking water five days after a Kona low storm tore through Puna with hurricane-force winds and left hundreds of households dark.

Vibrant Hawaiʻi, a nonprofit running a network of community resilience hubs across Hawaiʻi Island, organized the drive-through distribution starting at 1 p.m. Nearly 150 vehicles received supplies, according to aggregated reporting from multiple local outlets, a sharp jump from the roughly 102 cars that had shown up the day before.

Isaac Pedro, a Vibrant Hawaiʻi worker and Nanawale Estates resident, said word had clearly spread by the time Wednesday's event got underway. "We had about 102 cars yesterday, and then today it looks like the word got out, so we have more people in line," he said. "From what I see, it's almost out of the park now."

Pedro himself was running on a generator and relying on ice from the distribution to keep food from spoiling. "I'm running off a generator, but the ice is helping keep some of my food that stayed good throughout the whole thing," he said.

Volunteer Twinkle Barquis directed the flow of cars into position while Isaac Pedro and fellow volunteer Kahiau Deguair worked the loading line, dropping bags of ice into coolers and heaving cases of drinking water into truck beds. Above the organized chaos, volunteers shouted triage calls down the line — "No ice just water," "one and one," "just food" — straining to be heard over the drone of a Matson refrigerated trailer full of ice parked on site.

Olivia, a Nanawale Estates mother of four, stayed in her car as she moved through the line. With one child due home Thursday and no electricity in the house, the stretch without power had worn on her family. "Just having teenagers alone, no electric, cold water, stuff like that, it's pretty stressful," she said. She also thought of neighbors who could not make it out at all. "I can't imagine how to kupuna and younger babies down there, no more electric, no more water," she said.

As of Thursday morning, approximately 1,100 Hawaiian Electric Company customers across the island remained without power, with most outages concentrated in Puna and in North and South Kona.

Pedro acknowledged that mobilizing ice and water donations after past storms had sometimes taken far longer. "We had to wait a week or two before people kind of, like, really paid attention to it," he said of earlier relief cycles. This time, the distribution came together within days. "Being that it was only five days ago, it's pretty quick, and I'm happy to help, and we're happy that we get to distribute these things to everybody so that we can stay safe and fed and well-hydrated," he said.