Honolulu Weekly

Waimea Valley / At about 5am on Friday, Nov. 21, a large chunk of mountain fell onto the road on the east side park entrance at Waimea Valley. The rock slide blocked entry and cut off the valley’s electrical supply, phone and computer cables and water line.

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), majority owner and operator of the valley (via a subsidiary company, Hi’ipaka LLC), closed the park to the public and admitted only a handful of employees, including managers, gardeners and the staff of the Waimea Arboretum, which cares for the valley’s invaluable collection of native Hawaiian and exotic plants and trees.

Hi’ipaka management’s first reaction was curious: Strict orders were issued to employees not to discuss any aspect of the rock slide with anyone. As if to emphasize their seriousness about the gag order, when the husband of a cook at Waimea Valley Grill took a photograph of the rock slide on his cell phone, and it subsequently ran on the nightly television news, Hi’ipaka officials promptly banned him from re-entering the valley. Since then, employees have been unwilling to express their opinions and feelings without the assurance that they will not be attributed. Hi’ipaka officials did not return phone calls for this story.

“Hi’ipaka put a choke-hold on everything media-oriented,” said one employee who declined to be identified. Another added, “The silence is nothing new. For a long time, Gail (Chew, acting project director of the park) has been unavailable. Practically no one who works in the park can speak directly to her.

In the atmosphere of secrecy after the slide, park employees were left in the dark about their future. “Our biggest regret was the lack of knowledge or resolution,” said an employee. “When would the valley reopen? When would we return to work? Nobody knew.”

“The OHA people seemed to be frozen in inaction,” said another employee. “Maybe it was their cultural sensitivity to iwi (bones) that may have been in the rock slide, but no one was talking. Sometimes they can’t seem to get their priorities straight.”

Not all employees blamed OHA. “They’re a quasi-government agency,” one said, “and as such are required to follow the procurement regulations, which require three bids for every job. First, people need to scale the cliffs to see if anything else is likely to fall. Then there are the cultural considerations to be taken into account, then the rocks need to be removed, then the electrical, phone and computer lines fixed, then the water line repaired, and finally the road repaired. One step at a time. There are no bad guys here, and no one is foot-dragging. The problem is, nobody knows how long it will take. Three weeks? Two months? The unofficial consensus seems to be that the park will certainly not reopen until after the holidays.”

Timelines notwithstanding, the closure immediately had serious repercussions. For example, Chet Naylor, who operates Waimea Falls Grill, reportedly lost $20,000 worth of food in the days after the electricity was cut off. His business office is in the valley, as well his central kitchen, which also caters and prepares food for his Shark’s Cove Grill. He has been cooking elsewhere since the slide.

On Dec. 4, almost two weeks after the rock slide, Hi’ipaka convened an employee meeting at the Turtle Bay Resort. To their relief, both salaried park employees and hourly-wage workers were assured that their jobs were secure. Salaried employees will continue to collect their paychecks, and hourly employees such as greeters and educational workers will be given the opportunity to do alternate work in the park while it remains closed. Hi’ipaka management estimated that it will be four to six weeks before reopening is possible.

“It was about time,” said one hourly-wage employee. “We thought they’d abandoned us. We were waiting for them to make a decision. We thought we might be laid off. We were wondering if we should file for unemployment. I was concerned about my health insurance and how I was going to pay my mortgage next month. But nobody said anything until now.”

Another hourly-wage employee commented, “Two weeks was a long time to be waiting for answers, but OHA did a decent and generous thing by not letting people go.”

In the absence of solid information prior to the meeting, some employees seem to have made their own decisions. Bob Leinau, a well-known North Shore community member who has been employed in the valley since 1973, often as general manager and recently under OHA as facilities director, tendered his resignation on Dec. 2. And it was announced at the employee meeting that Loren Shim, the park’s business manager and Chew’s second-in-command, is no longer an employee.

At present, almost three weeks after the rockslide, the road remains blocked. At the entrance, a security guard sits at a table beneath an Op surf-contest shade canopy, just past a sign that reads, “Waimea Valley is closed.”