Kaua'i wept again on Sept. 11
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer
The disruptions of the terror attacks are eerily reminiscent for some Kaua'i residents of the days after Hurricane Iniki.
That's beyond the shared date: Sept. 11, 1992, for Hurricane Iniki, and Sept. 11, 2001, for the attacks on New York and Washington.
There is the same sense of being stunned, disoriented, and of having a single-minded focus on the disaster.
I talked to several people who admitted stopping to weep, so strong were the emotions this crisis brought them. They also wept in 1992, when homes, jobs, and the beauty of nature were swept away on the winds.
"It's hard to imagine getting beyond this. Ninety percent of your day, it's all you think about," said Beth Tokioka, who has been the voice of the Kaua'i civil defense agency.
In many ways, of course, the situations are very different. This crisis is far away, although it has remarkable effects on us here. The hurricane was all around us, largely to the exclusion of everything else.
Our dependence on the news, on electronic communications, is different. After Iniki, there was no electricity for weeks — no radio, no television, no Internet. Shucks, for many people, no lights.
But after the East Coast attacks, the silence over Lihu'e was similar. For days, no incoming or outgoing airline flights. Tour helicopter traffic shut down.
In both events there were days with no morning newspapers.
After Iniki, the information gap was — often destructively — filled with rumor. The bogus stories were all over the map on Kaua'i nine years ago. Stories of fatalities. Some areas getting emergency supplies denied to others. County officials abandoning outlying communities.
Not so different from some television news faces prattling about the impossibility of anyone surviving the World Trade Center collapse, while down the street, their colleagues are floating the likelihood that hundreds or even thousands could be trapped alive in the rubble.
Some folks on Kaua'i walked around last week exhausted from lack of sleep, after spending their nights entranced by the unending TV flow of information on the nation's response to the devastation. Nine years ago, the exhaustion was physical — from hauling water, hoisting broken parts of houses, moving debris, cleaning up.
We had thousands of tourists stuck in hotels in 1992 with no flights to get them home, just as we did this year. Of course, this time, they could call families to report in, and their toilets flushed.
Soon, the trapped tourists will have gotten on planes, the mail will be moving normally again and there will be bills to pay. And even if we can't yet imagine it, our lives will regain some order. Right now, it is difficult to see the way clear to that place.
"There is that sense of ennui, that feeling — 'What do I do now?' " said Lihu'e attorney Ted Chiha
