Deadly Hurricane Rains Destruction on Kauai Island : Storm: Up to four deaths and 55 injuries are reported. Buildings and boats are left smashed by winds and waves. Damage is estimated at more than $1 billion.

LIHUE, Hawaii — The island of Kauai lay dazed and broken Saturday, trampled by the terrible tread of Hurricane Iniki, which devastated much of it, flattening homes and resorts like yesterday’s beer cans. The governor of Hawaii estimated damage at more than $1 billion.

Power and phones were out. From the air, it appeared that one of every three structures was damaged or destroyed. Unconfirmed short-wave radio reports indicated that three people died. One additional death was reported on the island of Oahu. But Oahu and its principal city, Honolulu, across an 80-mile channel from Kauai, were spared the brunt of the storm.

On Kauai, home of 51,000, some 55 people were reported injured, three of them critically. But most suffered broken bones, and one had a heart attack. A Honolulu hospital was arranging a military flight to evacuate 55 kidney patients to Oahu so they could receive the life-preserving dialysis they need every 72 hours.

The eye of Hurricane Iniki struck western Kauai late Friday. It was a Category 3 storm at the time, with sustained winds of 130 m.p.h. and gusts up to 160 m.p.h. It carried 145 m.p.h. Category 4 winds offshore, with gusts as high as 175 m.p.h. Iniki was the most powerful storm to hit Hawaii this century, and nearly as strong as Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida and Louisiana last month.

Its deadly eye hit the lightly populated western shore of Kauai, devoted to sugar cane and pineapple plantations. Most of the residents of the island, its tourist bungalows and luxury hotels are concentrated farther east and on its southeastern shore. Kauai Mayor JoAnn Yukimura ordered tens of thousands of people from that area to flee inland or into shelters before Iniki struck.

The force of the hurricane also struck the tiny island of Niihau, about 25 miles southwest of Kauai. It is privately owned and the home of about 300 people whose ancestry can be traced to the original inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands. Communication with Niihau was extremely difficult, and there was no immediate word about casualties or damage.

President Bush, whose critics have said that he responded too slowly to Hurricane Andrew, declared most of Hawaii a federal disaster area. He included the islands of Kauai, Niihau, Oahu, Maui, Hawaii, Lanai and Kahoolawe. But neither Bush nor Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton planned to visit Hawaii.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said federal aid was on its way to Hawaii. Wallace E. Stickney, director of FEMA, said some relief workers were in place before Iniki hit. But he said that relief efforts were hampered by a lack of information about the extent of damage on Kauai.

“The damage is very extensive,” said Hawaii Gov. John Waihee, in an interview at Lihue airport after touring Kauai by helicopter. “I don’t know how to describe it. At this point, it’s a question of identifying which homes are still standing. I think we’ve got at least $1 billion worth of damage.”

Early information was indeed sketchy. While an overflight of the island showed that the hurricane spared about two thirds of its structures, there appeared to be heavy damage along its southern shore. Plush resort hotels dotting the coastline seemed hard hit--as were thousands of homes.

Most of the damage seemed to be along a 23-mile stretch from Lihue, the largest city on the island, to the town of Waimea. Colorful tiles from a number of roofs had blown inland, and the beams beneath were ripped into scores of splinters.

Swimming pools were gray with mud. Around resorts, cars were buried to their doors in reddish muck.

In residential areas, some homes appeared to have been destroyed, and several oceanfront cottages were shattered into piles of yellow timber.

Sugar cane fields near the town of Waimea were stripped clean. A large church was folded in half, its roof caved in with debris. At the coastline, chocolate brown water roiled in eddies, thick with foam and debris.

To the west and north, hotels and homes seemed to suffer less. Along Kauai’s less-inhabited western shore, steep cliffs and tall mountains appeared to have sheltered many structures from the storm. Nonetheless, the north coast town of Princeville seemed to have been hard hit.

Princeville stands on an exposed point. Its coastal hotels were stripped of their roofs, and shingles lay strewn along the waterfront and over golf courses.

National Guardsmen, ferrying emergency supplies, rescue teams and hundreds of soldiers to aid in recovery, described what they found on Kauai as unpleasant at best.

“Things are pretty grim over there right now,” reported National Guard Maj. Wayne Yoshioka as he prepared to leave Honolulu with a planeload of generators, food, communication equipment and relief workers.

Yoshioka had been to Kauai earlier in the day. At midmorning, thousands of people were still in Red Cross shelters, he said. Yoshioka said the roof had been blown off one of the shelters. The major added soberly: “There is a lot of structural damage.”

Because all telephones were out, some information from Kauai came by short-wave radio to Oahu, where Civil Defense spokeswoman Barbara Hendrie in Honolulu paraphrased this radio report by one Kauai resident to news services:

“Roads were impassable and there were lots of telephone poles down,” Hendrie said. “There were blown-off roofs, and everywhere this person was looking was damage--with some of the buildings totally blown away in every direction.”

Hendrie’s boss, Alan Uyeda, an administrative officer for the state department of Civil Defense, said Kauai had suffered “serious, extensive damage.”

A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser reported by radio that as many as a third of the homes on Kauai suffered severe damage. His report, relayed by the Associated Press, also said destruction was visible everywhere.

Many residents remained in shelters overnight, the reporter told the AP.

The news service said one ham radio operator reported heavy damage in the Poipu resort area in southern Kauai. It also said the Coast Guard was investigating more than 50 reports of vessels in distress in Hawaiian waters. But there was no indication that any had capsized.

Among those out of touch because of downed communications was movie director Steven Spielberg, caught on Kauai on what was to have been the last day of filming for his newest film, “Jurassic Park,” an adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel about modern-day dinosaurs.

Spielberg’s studio said it had not heard from him.

Before the hurricane hit, he told KNBC-TV in Los Angeles in a telephone interview that he and his cast and crew had taken refuge at a hotel.

On Oahu, the hurricane knocked out power to about 15,000 homes. Some water service was out. Three hotels reported minor flooding.

Civil defense officials said that 26,000 people on Oahu took refuge in 110 emergency shelters. Others huddled in their homes to ride out the storm.

Many travelers remained stranded at Honolulu International Airport. One group bent their heads in prayer. Others begged for news from Kauai. “We’re OK here,” said Glenn Engler, camped out on one of 1,200 cots in a waiting area. “But Kauai, they just went dead.”

Robert Hudson and his wife, Eileen, were among the last to escape Kauai as Iniki bore down. They sipped coffee at the airport and tried to settle their jangled nerves. “Nobody seemed to be all that concerned,” Robert Hudson said, “because it looked like the storm was going to miss us. Then, all of a sudden, we were dead on target.”

He said he and his wife were awakened by sirens as the hurricane approached. He said they set out quickly for the Kauai airport.

“Everyone was real cooperative,” said Joel Cohen, a New York native who was honeymooning on Kauai with Holly, his bride, when the storm hit. “We had figured that we would stay in Kauai,” Cohen said, “because we thought we’d be safer than if we came to Oahu.

“But then it (the hurricane) turned and came right at us.

“We took off.”

For some, the silence from Kauai was especially chilling. They desperately sought word about friends or relatives still on the island.

“I was in the Philippines on vacation,” said Manuel Rumion of Long Beach, Calif., “and I got on a plane yesterday to come to Kauai so that I could visit my relatives. I have four sisters and one brother there, and I cannot find out how they are.”

Rumion tried airline after airline in a futile effort to make it across the channel between Oahu and Kauai. But the airlines canceled all commercial service.

They did not expect to restore it for at least a day or two.

“All I can do is hope that my family stayed on high ground,” Rumion said. “They have been through a hurricane before, but it was nothing like this.”

On Maui, at least 20 boats were lost to the relentless pounding of wind-driven waves. Most of the vessels broke free of their moorings outside of protected harbors and splintered as the surf tossed them onto rocky beaches.

“They were pounded to smithereens,” said Richard Haake, managing director of the county of Maui. The county’s jurisdiction includes the smaller islands of Molokai, Lanai and Kahoolawe.

Raging surf and high tide also washed out a small portion of the coastal Honoapiilani Highway that encircles the westernmost section of Maui.

“Unfortunately, it’s going to take a couple of days for crews to rebuild the portion that was undermined by the surf,” Haake said. He said he had gotten no reports of damage to oceanfront homes in the town of Lahaina on the western shore. It was the only neighborhood evacuated on Maui or on any of the other, smaller islands.

But waves reaching as high as 12 feet destroyed Maui’s Mala wharf. Waves knocked down a rock breakwater on Molokai and damaged three boats in a south-facing harbor on the island of Lanai.

Authorities reported no storm related deaths or injuries on Maui, Molokai, Lanai or Kahoolawe.

The big island of Hawaii lies at the eastern edge of the Hawaiian Islands, out of reach of the gale force winds and the most damaging waves.

Civil air patrols took to the skies Saturday to look for boats that were believed to have blown out to sea.

None of the vessels were believed to have been occupied.

Staff writers Victor Merina and Kenneth R. Weiss in Honolulu and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles contributed to this story.