Twenty North Shore residents on Wednesday sued the City and County of Honolulu and the previous owners of Lake Wilson and the Wahiawā Dam for negligence over flood damage to their homes during the Kona lows in March.
The residents, all of whom are homeowners or renters on Haona Street, were forced to flee in the middle of the night earlier this year as the nearby Kaukonahua Stream swelled and overflowed from an enormous amount of rain during the historic storm. They say the city was negligent in its maintenance of the stream.
The city owns a section of the stream that had been clogged for years before the floods, despite pleas from residents to clear mud, silt, debris and large trees. Honolulu had considered dredging the stream over the years, spending more than $450,000 on stream studies, but those projects were never pursued. The stream was only cleared after the floods in March.
Civil Beat found that Kaukonahua was not the only flood-prone stream on Oʻahu that went unmaintained for years. There were areas across the island where government agencies had flood mitigation studies on hand that sat for years without being acted on…