In North Kīhei where Mike Moran lives, the beaches extend across quieter stretches of coastline that are most popular with locals. 

Canoe clubs use them as a launching point into Mā‘alaea Bay. People walk their dogs along the shoreline. There are no lifeguard stands and far fewer tourists than bustling South Kīhei. 

But Moran worries about these beaches slowly disappearing after decades of sea level rise and coastal erosion. This year, a series of storms has struck Maui, triggering massive flooding from rainwater rushing down the mountains to the sea and high surf that has battered the shoreline.

“Those poor beaches have really suffered from both ends,” Moran said. 

Coastlines across Maui are showing the effects of torrential rains and an unusually strong hurricane season in the Pacific. In South Maui, portions of beach parks are roped off due to erosion. In West Maui, sandbags are holding the waves at bay on a shrinking shoreline, while caution tape, cones and fencing block off undermined sections of the beach walkway.

And while the seasonal disappearance and return of beaches is normal, experts say the extreme weather that Hawai‘i has seen makes it even harder for beaches to naturally recover, especially with the current El Niño conditions only expected to get stronger heading into next year.

“We’ve had these repetitive episodic events, and cumulatively they have caused a lot of shoreline erosion on top of flooding and everything else that has come with them,” said Tara Owens, the Maui Nui program coordinator for the University of Hawai‘i Sea Grant program. “So our shorelines in South Maui and West Maui have been fairly hard hit.”

Before this year, many Maui beaches already were facing chronic erosion, the long-term, continuous loss of shoreline that comes with sea-level rise, Owens said.  

But over the last several months, the beaches have contended with the additional challenges of “episodic erosion” — acute effects in a short amount of time — from the consecutive Kona low storms in March to the seven tropical cyclones that have passed through the Central Pacific since July. 

“They’re feeling not just (Hurricane) Lowell,” said Chris Conger, vice president of Sea Engineering and the lead scientific consultant for the proposed Kā‘anapali Beach Restoration Project. “They’re feeling Lala. They’re feeling big south swell. They’re feeling probably all the way back to the March event.”

The consecutive blows are “like watching a bad boxing match,” Conger said.

Michael Cain, the administrator of the state Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, said coastal erosion had already been a crisis for a decade, and the recent storms have “created new crisis spots.”

That includes Po‘ipū on Kaua‘i, where the storm surge sucked up the beach and deposited the sand into nearby hotel pools. The area had erosion issues before, “but now it’s a crisis,” said Cain, who visited the island earlier this week.

“These storms move sand around a lot,” Cain said. “It’s harder to quantify, did we lose beach, or is it just lifted significantly? Like is the sand still in the system? And in a natural environment, the beach would have just migrated inland, but with resorts or with developments, the beach doesn’t have room to migrate.”

As seasonal erosion starts to ease and hard-hit areas start filling with sand again, officials and scientists will get a better idea of which beaches are coming back. 

Location plays a big part in a beach’s recovery. South Maui beaches are in better position to naturally return, with a “sand-rich system” compared to West Maui’s “sand-starved system,” Owens said.

A place like Keawakapu Beach in Kīhei where erosion and storms have resulted in completely exposed rock along the shoreline could recover within a matter of weeks. But struggling coastlines like the one fronting the condominiums in Kahana may take longer and may not return to the same capacity as healthier beaches. 

“The challenge this year is that we’ve had continuous episodic events, so there wasn’t a lot of time to recover in between those events,” Owens said. “So the impact has been cumulative. But the good news is the beaches still will recover.”

But some areas could use a little extra help. On Maui’s north shore, Owens is spearheading a dune restoration project to counter decades of beach loss from sand mining, sea level rise and big surf. 

In July, the Kā‘anapali Operators Association and the Pilikahakai Foundation announced that they had applied for a permit for a project to restore the beach with sand collected offshore.

Plans call for restoring about 50,000 cubic yards of sand between Hanaka‘ō‘ō Beach Park and Hanaka‘ō‘ō Point, widening the dry beach by 41 to 78 feet, as well as enhancing the berm between Hanaka‘ō‘ō Point and Pu‘u Keka‘a, also known as Black Rock, with about 25,000 cubic yards of sand, raising the berm elevation by 3.5 feet.

The project has faced opposition from residents who are worried about the impacts to the nearshore environment. In 2023, the Board of Land and Natural Resources turned down a proposal to split the $10 million project costs with the Kā‘anapali Operators Association, saying they didn’t want to use public resources to protect private property. The project is now set to be privately funded.

“I’m not against beach restoration, I’m against desecration,” Doreen Napua Canto, the board’s then-Maui Nui representative, said at the time. “Dredging the sand will impact the nearshore environment, fishing, lifeguard services, cultural practices and canoe racing. We need to ask ourselves: ‘How can we be better stewards of our ocean for the amount of time we have left with her?'”

Conger said sea level rise and storms will continue to batter the beach regardless, and restoration “resets the clock” and gives more time to find solutions. The sand will come from the middle of a large offshore sand field that would not impact any reefs in the area.

“It’s not a permanent solution; it’s a mid-term step in a much longer adaptation pathway,” Conger said. “Beach restoration is kind of like this holistic opportunity that restores ecosystem. It restores a natural resource. It restores public trust land. It is for the benefit of everyone in Hawai‘i.”

Cain said he couldn’t speak to the project’s impacts because his agency has to stay neutral and listen to public comments before writing a recommendation to the board. 

But he said the right solution is different for each beach. Waikīkī Beach, for example, was lost in the 1910s and now requires active beach nourishment. Places like Baldwin Beach Park on Maui or Kailua Beach on O‘ahu do well with dunes and coastal vegetation.

The challenge is places like O‘ahu’s North Shore or West Maui “where the development is right on the water.” 

“There isn’t room to do some of the natural solutions that would be our preference, and I think that’s where the hard choices need to be made,” Cain said. “Do we invest in beach nourishment? Will beach nourishment even work in some areas? It’s remarkably rare in Hawai‘i. There’s a limited quantity of sand.” 

Where possible, beach and dune restoration projects are among the priorities in Maui County’s 2025 Hazard Mitigation Plan to help prepare for potential future disasters. 

The Department of Parks and Recreation Parks Beautification Division operates a native plant nursery and has ongoing shoreline restoration projects at county beach parks, the county told the Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative. In Kīhei, native plantings have been done at Kama‘ole Beach Parks I and II, as well as Cove Park, and dune restoration has been ongoing for over a decade at Kama‘ole Beach Parks I, II and III.

Within the last several years, the county has created a “dune crew” to expand and maintain dune restoration, with recent projects including Haycraft Park in Mā‘alaea, Waipuilani Park in Kīhei and Kaupakalua (Baldwin Beach Park) in Pā‘ia. The county also has partnered with The Nature Conservancy on a pilot project at Ukumehame Beach Park to clear invasive plants and put in native ones.

Owens has been working with the Kā‘anapali Operators Association to improve dune and vegetation management that could involve switching out turf grasses or naupaka for better-suited plants like native vines and grasses that stabilize the shoreline. 

The harder questions are what to do with threatened critical infrastructure like roads, lines and wastewater pump stations, or with developments like beachfront homes, businesses and hotels. Owens pointed out that Maui County is discussing relocating the pump station near Kama‘ole Beach Park I, which closed temporarily after Hurricane Lowell so crews could reinforce the eroded shoreline.

On South Kīhei Road where a large portion of the pavement collapsed during flooding in March, contractors installed 90 Kyowa rock-filled bags, 15 marine mattresses and 80 cubic yards of riprap beneath a restored layer of sand and landscaping. 

On North Kīhei Road near Kealia Pond where storm surge during Hurricane Lowell in September cracked the pavement, the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation installed “large, flexible, marine-grade mesh bags filled with surge rock to prevent coastal erosion from undermining the highway.” Director Ed Sniffen said this is known as “a soft revetment that absorbs wave energy and is less impactful to surrounding sections of the coastline.”

The state transporation department has used the marine-grade mesh bag solution on Oahu’s Kamehameha Highway in Hauʻula.

“While they do need to be checked and reset occasionally, this is considered a permanent coastal highway protection measure,” Sniffen said in an emailed statement.

He added that the department is also “studying nature-based solutions such as hybrid reef structures and traditional fishponds.”

Coastal hazards experts like Owens are cautious about armoring shorelines, which have been found to worsen erosion. For example, many of the seawalls along the Kahana condominiums that have exacerbated erosion on neighboring properties were built in response to another strong El Niño in 2015, Owens said. 

Cain said bags buried under the sand are “definitely better than a massive seawall, which we know would be destructive.” 

“Our preference would be no hardening at all, let the shoreline be naturalized, but we can’t really do that when there’s a highway running along the shoreline,” Cain said. “We don’t always like projects, but it’s the best option we have. … For all these events, and even ongoing coastal erosion, it’s going to be hard choices where we put our money, where we invest our resources.”

Cain said managed retreat “definitely needs to be on the table,” but what that actually looks like is still “a big question.”

Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin, who holds the West Maui seat, sees managed retreat as the ultimate answer. She pushed for legislation to create the county’s managed retreat revolving fund in 2022, but she said the funding is meant to address public health and safety hazards, not serve as “a wealthy oceanfront landowner’s buyout.” 

“It’s only going to get worse,” Paltin said. “And by worse, we don’t mean the slow, steady rise of the ocean. It’s the one-time catastrophic events, like Hurricane Lowell, storm surge and things like that.”

Fellow Council Member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez said last month at the Hawai’i State Association of Counties conference that the money and effort that went into building resorts right on the ocean has put government in a tough position as it seeks solutions for coastal erosion.

“There’s so many decisions that were made decades ago that we’re now suffering the consequences of,” she said.

On the shoreline fronting the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort & Spa in Kā‘anapali, an erosion control skirt that was supposed to be temporary when it was installed a decade ago has tried to hold off beach loss. The Hyatt had asked the state for permission to install another skirt farther down the shoreline after the Kona low storms undermined its beach walkway, but after pushback from community members, the resort ultimately decided to just push sand to shore up the sidewalk, Cain said.

The existing erosion skirt has an extension to stay in place through July 29, 2027, according to Department of Land and Natural Resources documents.

If the Kā‘anapali beach restoration project moves forward, Conger said the association can look at more permanent solutions like managed retreat.

“It’s the community. It’s the resorts. It’s planners. It’s agencies that all have to sit together and kind of work through a multi-year project to look at all of those different strategies and see how they might fit,” he said.

For now, the jury is still out on whether the storms this year will make the push for solutions more urgent.

“Repetitive disasters do have a way of elevating priority for hazard mitigation and adaptation,” Owens said. “So we’ll see if that’s the case here with these storms.”