When Ha‘ikū resident Scott Werden was trying to find out Saturday night during Hurricane Lala if his family’s flight out of Maui had been cancelled, he drove miles down Hāna Highway searching for cell service. 

“I never got any bars on my phone, and then I got worried about driving around in the middle of a hurricane, so I went back home,” Werden said Tuesday. 

He was among the many Maui residents who suffered an unlucky trifecta of outages during Lala — no power, no internet and no cell service. It’s unclear exactly how many lost all three. Hawaiian Electric said more than 26,000 customers in Maui County lost power over the weekend, but Spectrum, Hawaiian Telcom and phone service providers did not detail specific numbers.

For those living in rural areas, spotty service is a part of country life. But it’s also a reminder of the gaps on an isolated island three years after the deadly Lahaina wildfires cut off communications for both residents and first responders.

“It’s so dangerous,” Neil Hasegawa said Tuesday evening in a phone call from his Hāmoa home via Starlink, the satellite high-speed internet service run by SpaceX.

In a lifetime of living in East Maui, the owner of the Hasegawa General Store said he couldn’t remember everything going out at the same time.

“It’s really unusual,” he said. “Normally we’ll have cell but no cable, and then vice versa … but hardly ever having both off at the same time.”

Hurricane Lala skirted south of the islands on Saturday as a Category 1 storm, hitting the southern tip of Hawai‘i island the hardest with winds of 70 mph and heavy rains that damaged more than 200 homes and killed 93-year-old former Nā‘ālehu schoolteacher May Doi and a man in his 60s.

On Maui, the rainfall was much less than during the Kona low in March, when nearly 50 inches of rain fell over two days, soaking Upcountry and flooding low-lying Kīhei. This time, the summit of Haleakalā recorded about 17 inches of rain on Saturday and Sunday. Still, the strong winds led to widespread damage, with trees toppling across power lines and smashing onto the rooftops of local businesses and churches. 

More than 250,900 customers across the state were out of power at the peak of the outages on Sunday morning, including about 26,200 in Maui County, according to Hawaiian Electric. By 8 p.m. Tuesday, about 86% of customers were back online, but about 33,600 remained without power, including 1,700 in Maui County.

HECO expects to have 95% of customers back online by Friday and is bringing in help from Mainland utilities. 

During the outages, Maui County opened charging stations for residents to power their electronic devices and connect to Wi-Fi via Starlink at the Eddie Tam Memorial Center in Makawao, which “has been widely used,” and the Kula Community Center, the county communications office said Tuesday. The county also provided Starlink services at shelters in Hāna, Lahaina and other locations. 

Spectrum has restored services for thousands of customers but could not share the number of people on Maui who were still without coverage as of Tuesday. The company said service interruptions were related to power outages and that power had to be restored first before repairs could be made.

Nearly 3,000 Spectrum Wi-Fi access points have also been opened across Hawai‘i, though some may be offline until power is restored, the company added. 

Hawaiian Telcom also did not provide the number of customers still without service as of Tuesday. The company said in a statement it has been “working to restore service to Maui customers as quickly and safely as possible” after Lala, with crews running into tough conditions in rural areas and “repairs prioritized based on safety, network impact and community needs.”

In May, Hawaiian Telcom announced it had expanded fiber coverage on Maui, making it the fourth fully fiber-enabled island in the state. The company is on a $1.7 billion mission to make Hawai‘i the first fully fiber-enabled state in the nation by the end of this year.

Fiber has been touted as reliable in bad weather because the lines are more durable than cable and other technology and are protected underground. Maui County said it supports Hawaiian Telcom’s efforts and that “fiber has allowed Maui residents to be more resilient during emergencies.”

But after the Kona lows in March and Hurricane Lala this month, growing frustration with outages is pushing many rural residents to find other ways to keep their homes running and stay in contact with the outside world.

At the Hasegawa General Store, the internet, cell service and phone lines that run the backup credit card machines went down at different points over the weekend, forcing the store to resort to cash transactions for three days. Hasegawa spent a frustratingly long time on the phone with Spectrum and Hawaiian Telcom, unable to get updates on when his service might be restored. 

“Nobody can tell us anything,” he said.

At one point he was loading freight at the store when a family of tourists, including parents and a child, walked in to say their rental car had gotten a flat tire about five miles out of town and they had no way to call for help. Hasegawa couldn’t even phone a tow truck, so he sent the family to the police station in hopes it had better communication systems. 

Before the Kona low storms, Hasegawa invested in Starlink for his home, and he’s determined to do the same for the store, not just to keep business running, but also so customers can use it in an emergency. The system relies on satellites that are much closer to Earth than traditional ones, meaning data doesn’t have to travel as far. His service worked so well during the storm that he was able to watch TV. His power didn’t go out, but he was prepared after buying a generator in the wake of the Kona low that left Hāna without power for days. 

Unlike in March, his store wasn’t damaged, but the rain was harrowing, filling the rivers and culverts enough that the water crested over the four bridges that Hasegawa has to cross to get home.

“You just gotta put one foot in front of the other and just keep walking forward,” he said of enduring a year of big storms. “I really feel for the guys on the Big Island though. … If those winds and that rain would’ve hit Hāna, oh my goodness.” 

Hasegawa is concerned about what would happen if all major services went down again and advised people in remote areas to get Starlink so they won’t have to wait on the utilities or the government to install something that will get them through a disaster. He said his bill comes out to about $120 a month.

Then he paused to hear some good news.

“Oh wait, my wife said we got cell service now,” he said shortly before 7 p.m. 

Christine Hill, manager of Hāna Ranch Store, hasn’t had working Hawaiian Telcom phone service at her Nāhiku home since the Kona low. Her late father was on oxygen and got Starlink so he could reach 911 if needed, and after his death, Hill inherited the system. She thinks other companies are “losing a lot of business because everybody’s going to Starlink now.”  

On Monday, Hill’s home had been without power for three days. They relied on solar energy until the toll of running the refrigerator and her 86-year-old mother’s TV shows depleted the supply and they switched to the generator. Her husband drove her to work in his truck because after scraping her low-riding Honda on unseen rocks on a flooded road during the Kona low, she didn’t want to risk the damage again. 

“Just the normal challenges of living out here,” Hill said from the store where she could make calls over Wi-Fi. 

In Kula, Kyle Ellison bought Starlink for the off-grid baseyard of Mālama Kula, the nonprofit he runs to help community members reduce fire risks and clear green waste from their properties. But without power, his connection could only go so far. After the battery died and the solar energy failed after three days of cloud cover, there wasn’t much he could do.

“Climb a hill and hope you get a little service,” he said. “Seriously, it was challenging, it was tricky.”

During the storm, Hawaiian Electric sent outage maps to people’s emails, which Ellison said was nice, but the internet connection wasn’t strong enough for customers to open the link.

Ellison’s solution for emergencies is low-bandwidth services like text messages and old-fashioned communication: knowing your neighbors.

“There’s something to be said for in-person,” he said. “You drive around and you talk to people. That’s what you do.”

Ellison and Mālama Kula’s crew spent the aftermath of the storm driving to people’s houses in ‘Ulupalakua, Kēōkea and Upper Kula to help them remove downed trees and branches. They cleared driveways where residents were blocked in and also cleaned up a couple of roadways.

“I would say that we’re looking at more tree damage and less flooding (than the Kona low),” Ellison said. “This is still a big mess, but not as bad as compared to March for some areas.” 

The dead and downed trees will be cut up and processed into wood chips, which will be donated to people around Kula who need them for erosion control or agriculture. Mālama Kula also still has five dumpsters for people to drop off their green waste for free. 

Whether it’s a fire or a hurricane coming, Ellison urged people to create a “defensible space,” a buffer between vegetation and their home. 

In Ha‘ikū, power lines and trees were still down on Kaupakalua Road as of Tuesday, said Werden, the treasurer of the Ha‘ikū Community Association. 

He said Hurricane Lala was “much worse” than the Kona low due to the high winds. The storm turned his neighborhood on Ulumalu Road into a big river, but he still managed to take his family to the airport to catch their flight on Sunday morning. 

Werden, who doesn’t have Starlink, lost power on Saturday and regained it on Tuesday afternoon. He said he hoped that the cell towers could be improved so they could withstand a hurricane in the future. 

Lucienne de Naie doesn’t have Starlink either at her Ha‘ikū home, relying on one 50-year-old copper landline and two cellphones that only work if there’s internet at her home. If there’s an emergency when cell service is out, she has to drive around until she gets a signal to make a call.

De Naie, the president of the Ha‘ikū Community Association, is used to losing power for short periods of time on a regular basis. Only part of her road is hooked up to the grid, and many people rely on solar generators. She’s learned to put frozen water bottles in the freezer so that if power cuts out, the food will stay chilled. 

Because there’s also no public water supply in her area, she relies on a well, but without power, she can’t draw from it, and there wasn’t enough sun leading up to the storm to generate solar power even if she had a system. That’s why she keeps dozens of bottles of water “filled at all times” for drinking, washing dishes and flushing the toilet in a pinch.

When power went out during Lala, she kept her fridge closed to save as much cold air as possible and made dinner on a gas stove solely out of homegrown ingredients.

“We had some nice pumpkins from our pumpkin patch,” she said. “I harvested some fresh ginger, some herbs, some leeks from the garden, and I made a nice pumpkin soup by lantern light.”