Recent drownings in Wailea put spotlight on Maui’s longtime issue of too many unguarded beaches

WAILEA — The cries for help reached painting contractor Zeb Walls at about 2 p.m. on May 23 as he worked on an oceanfront condo in Wailea. 

Glancing past the gawking bystanders, Walls spotted two men struggling in the choppy conditions along the south end of Wailea Beach in front of the Four Seasons Resort. He tossed his phone, raced across the bridge between the condos and the beach and grabbed a paddleboard from the sand. 

Walls managed to get one of the swimmers partially onto the paddleboard and onto an outcropping of rocks near the shore, where his co-worker Marty Forbes scrambled through the coastal shrubs and onto the rocks to lend a hand.

“As each wave rolled over, we would just tumble up the rocks until it stopped flowing up, and I would lock myself in again, and I’d hang on to (the victim),” said Forbes, who bruised his ribs during the rescue.

The waves pushed them up and down the rocks a few more times before some people on the path above came down and helped pull the man out of the waves. They started CPR, “but he was gone at that point,” Forbes said.

First responders pronounced the 33-year-old man dead at the scene. 

The other swimmer, a 56-year-old man who had gotten swept out with the currents, was pulled unresponsive from the water by a jet ski that responded from another beach. He was brought to shore where first responders tried to resuscitate him before transporting him in critical condition to Maui Memorial Medical Center, where he later died. 

Before the Aug. 8, 2023 wildfire that drastically curbed tourism, Maui County had the second-highest ocean drowning fatality rate per capita in the state from 2019-2023, according to the Hawai‘i Water Safety Plan released in January. And, the average per capita rate of drownings was twice as high on Neighbor Islands as on O‘ahu. 

In April, Maui County lifeguards extended their shifts from eight hours to 10 hours to allow them to perform rescues later in the day. But with only 12 lifeguard stations on Maui, there are still dozens of popular beaches that are left unguarded, including Wailea Beach. Some think the oceanfront hotels whose guests use the beaches — many of whom do not have experience in the ocean — should do more to provide rescue equipment, trained staff or a lifeguard tower of their own. 

“It could have easily been a crazy story that these tourists could have had when they go home. That could have been it,” Walls said. “But it turned into a mess of tragedy because there’s no safety gear.” 

But ocean safety experts say it might not be the best solution for hotels to find their own lifeguards, and it’s unlikely given the liability issues.

“In a perfect world, a private-public partnership would be great to enhance the safety of visitors and our locals,” said Jonathan Kaneshina, operations manager for the Maui Fire Department’s Ocean Safety Bureau. “But to have it mandated in front of hotels or condos is something that’s never kind of been done anywhere else in the state. It kind of would set a tremendous precedent.”

WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?

New York City resident and Four Seasons guest Allison Carbonell grew up around the ocean, but even still, on her honeymoon and first trip to Maui, she rated her comfort level in the ocean a “4” on a scale of 1 to 10. 

“I would feel more comfortable if there was a lifeguard,” she acknowledged as she and her husband Michael Carbonell prepared to head down to Wailea Beach. 

About 87 lifeguards work at Maui’s 12 towers, including two each at Mākena, Ho‘okipa and Kanaha beaches, one at each of the three Kama‘ole beaches, and one each at Hanakaʻōʻō, D.T. Fleming and Baldwin beaches, according to Kaneshina. Seven towers have jet skis. There are no lifeguard towers on Moloka‘i or Lāna‘i.

Entry-level ocean safety officers can make about $4,344 a month, according to a county job listing. But there are just four recruits in the latest class. And Kaneshina said there’s neither enough funding nor staffing to cover every beach on Maui. 

“Ever since COVID, every profession, it’s been a struggle to get personnel,” Kaneshina said. “So we’re trying, and to get personnel on all these beaches would be monumental as far as funding goes. So I think it’s a little bit of both.” 

Switching to longer hours has offered more coverage, but Kaneshina said it’s also left them short-handed, leading some officials like him to serve as captains in the field every now and then.

On a windy day at Ho‘okipa, Kaneshina played an unresponsive snorkeler caught in the crashing waves as each recruit practiced hauling him onto a rescue surfboard. Kaneshina urged them to rely more on techniques than muscle, to use the buoyancy of the board and the lift from the waves. 

Beyond rescue skills, one of the most important things that lifeguards provide is prevention. Having a lifeguard on a beach makes a huge difference, Kaneshina said. If the tower is open, beachgoers stop by to ask about conditions and recommendations for ocean activities. Lifeguards make regular announcements, often telling swimmers and others they are too close to rocks or too far away from the beach, and meet one-on-one with people who aren’t heeding the warnings. 

“If we see someone doing something not safe or attempting to do something not safe, we can stop it right there in the tracks before it becomes a rescue or before it becomes a drowning,” Kaneshina said. 

While most drowning victims tend to be tourists, residents also have succumbed to the ocean. From 2019-2023, Hawai‘i ranked second in the nation after Alaska for rates of drowning among residents, according to state Department of Health data. 

On Maui, there have been 207 fatal ocean drownings from 2015-2024. Of those, 147, or 71%, were visitors, while 60 were Hawai‘i residents. 

Epidemiologist Dan Galanis said there were no clear trends from year to year, other than a drop to fewer than 10 drownings during the first year of the pandemic in 2020. Drownings also fell from 25 in 2022 to 13 in 2023, the year of the wildfires that curbed tourism, before climbing back up to 19 in 2024, though that number is provisional. 

The department did not have data yet for 2025, but Kaneshina said the Maui Fire Department has recorded nine drownings so far. 

The Wailea Beach victims were visitors, a father and son from Kazakhstan, according to a pastor who spoke with the family. They were guests at the Four Seasons in town for a conference, and relatives had paid for the whole family of four to make the trip to Maui together. 

Fifteen years ago at the same beach, Forbes also swam out to help a scuba diver panicking in a rip current. He said the distance between the towers in Kīhei and Mākena is “a pretty big span,” especially given that fewer visitors are going to Lahaina after the fire.

“So this is where all the tourists are coming,” Forbes said. “Shouldn’t there be another lifeguard in between?”

Considering how long it’s taken to get a planned lifeguard tower built at Pu‘u Keka‘a, or Black Rock, a known hotspot for drownings in Maui County, there’s no telling what the timeline would be for one in South Maui. 

The Pu‘u Keka‘a tower has been talked about for at least a decade, but it’s been complicated by the fact that the land above the high-water mark is privately owned, and everything out to the ocean is overseen by the state. In 2017, the community rejected the idea of moving the lifeguard tower at Hanakaʻōʻō to Pu‘u Keka‘a, saying instead that the state and Kā‘anapali resorts should pay for a new tower. 

The pandemic slowed the effort before it was revived last year, Kaneshina said. In August, the Kā‘anapali Operators Association struck an agreement with Maui County to provide up to $150,000 for the building of the tower, said Raphael Wellerstein, president of the association. 

Kaneshina said the Maui Fire Department has selected a consultant to help with permitting and the hiring of a civil engineer given that the swells change the shape of the beach. The original plan was to put the tower at the end of the beach access path between the Sheraton and the Outrigger Kā‘anapali Beach Resort, and because of how much the beach moves, “that’s probably the only spot it can go,” Kaneshina said. However, he said the plans were in the early stages and that there was no timeline or cost estimate yet. 

“I wish I had a timeline. We want it to be tomorrow,” he said. 

When asked if he thought other hotels had a responsibility to follow the association’s lead, Wellerstein said, “I don’t know if it’s necessarily their responsibility to do it. I think that ultimately again this falls within the authority of the state and the county, but … if we can get this up and running and be successful with it, hopefully some other associations and resorts will kind of follow suit. But that’s to be determined.”

Even if other hotels could build more towers, the county may not have the staffing to fill them all, and Kaneshina said the work that goes into running a tower is part of why he doesn’t see hotels investing in their own services. County lifeguards go through annual training to keep their accreditation and also require medical training.

“If they would take on some kind of operation like that, that’s a pretty steep hill to climb,” Kaneshina said. “I’m all for the public safety and whatever would get towers everywhere, especially those hot areas. I’m just not sure how it would look like.” 

Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin, a former lifeguard of nearly 20 years, agreed that liability is a barrier. 

“Suppose a hotel hired a lifeguard and that lifeguard wasn’t able to save someone — is their liability more than if they never hired a lifeguard and the person drowned?” Paltin asked. “Or if they warn the person like ‘hey, this is too big, this is beyond my capability of being able to go out and save you,’ and they go out anyway, is that good enough?”

Neither the Four Seasons nor The Grand Wailea, which also borders Wailea Beach, could be reached for comment. 

The Maui Hotel and Lodging Association declined to comment, as did the Maui Visitors and Convention Bureau. 

GETTING THE MESSAGE ACROSS 

Most visitors at Wailea Beach who spoke with the Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative said they had not heard about the recent drownings, nor had they been given instructions on ocean safety. 

Lauren Burns of Nashville, Tenn., said she’s stayed at different Wailea hotels in her four trips to Maui, and none of them had offered ocean safety tutorials. 

Ashli and Mike Miles of Charleston, S.C., said they also didn’t receive any tutorials but always check the conditions before heading out to snorkel. 

“We’re pretty good swimmers and so are our kids, so we felt pretty good about it, but we always feel safer when there’s a lifeguard on the beach,” Ashli Miles said. 

Steven Schaefer of Beverly Hills, Calif., said his hotel told them to stay away from the rocks and wouldn’t rent them snorkel equipment on days when conditions were rough. 

“There’s really nothing else they could’ve warned us about,” Schaefer said. 

Until the number of lifeguard towers can match the demand, education and stop-gap measures like the rescue tubes installed by community members and Rotary clubs at unguarded beaches will play a critical role. The bright yellow foam tubes are about 50 inches long with a tether that can drape across the rescuer’s shoulder while swimming to the people needing help. A tube can keep three adults afloat. Kaneshina says he wants to see those “everywhere” and praised their role in preventing double drownings of the rescuer and the person in distress.

However, there’s no full substitute for a trained ocean safety officer, and Jessamy Hornor, public health educator in drowning and aquatic injury prevention with the state Health Department, had simple advice for preventing drownings.

“Really from a prevention standpoint, our No. 1 message is to go to a lifeguarded beach,” Hornor said.

If people do opt for an unguarded beach, Hornor advised that they check ocean conditions and warning signs, swim with a buddy and check for beach access points in case they need to call 911. She encouraged people to visit hioceansafety.com for more tips. 

The issue hits home for Hornor, whose husband and daughter died in 2016 at O‘ahu’s Makapu‘u tide pools, “which was not a lifeguarded location, and response time absolutely played a role.” That’s how Hornor became passionate about ocean safety and ended up in her current role. She’s also the co-founder of the Hawai‘i Water Safety Coalition that authored the recent report, and she’s a bereaved family advocate. 

Hornor said Hawai‘i should “really be embracing technology” in helping people stay safe in the ocean, whether that’s with an app providing ocean conditions and safety tips or “geofencing” alerts put out to all phones in a specific area.

Colin Yamamoto, a former ocean safety battalion chief who was instrumental in the rescue tube project, said the tourism industry worries about scaring people away but needs to make clear the dangers of drowning. 

Yamamoto said government agencies have a “duty to warn” the public of hazards, and that hotels should put to good use the resources provided by the county. He used to pass out hundreds of ocean safety brochures to hotels during presentations on the rescue tube program. Putting that information in all of the rooms could not only protect the hotel from lawsuits but make the experience safer for guests, he said.

“When someone dies … the word gets back to the Mainland they drowned, and it’s bad publicity for Hawai‘i,” he said. “So if you want tourists to come, you gotta promote that it’s safe.”