Hurricane Damage in Hawaii Expected to Top $1 Billion : Storm: Island of Kauai hardest hit, with two dead and 98 injured. One death is reported on Oahu. Boats and buildings are smashed. Federal disaster declared.

LIHUE, Hawaii — The island of Kauai lay dazed and broken Saturday, trampled by the terrible tread of Hurricane Iniki, which flattened 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. The mayor of Kauai County said two people were killed. One death was reported on the island of Oahu. But Oahu and its principal city, Honolulu, across an 80-mile channel from here, were spared the brunt of the storm.

On Kauai, home of 51,000, some 98 people were injured, the president of Wilcox Memorial Hospital said. He said seven were admitted. Most suffered broken bones, and one had a heart attack. A Honolulu hospital arranged military flights 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 hit 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 aid was on its way. Wallace E. Stickney, director of FEMA, said some relief workers were in place before Iniki hit. But he said relief efforts were hampered by a lack of information about the extent of damage.

“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.

“This is probably the worst disaster we’ve ever had in the state of Hawaii.”

While an overflight of Kauai 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 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.

At the airport in Lihue, the biggest city on Kauai, damaged helicopters were strewn by the runway, lying on their sides like dead animals.

“That was our (sightseeing) industry,” said Gary Baldwin, manager of a Thrifty car rental office, pointing at the wrecked aircraft. Kauai is known as Hawaii’s “Garden Island” because of its breathtaking scenery, particularly Waimea Canyon, called “the Grand Canyon of the Pacific.”

Residents fiercely protect the natural beauty and ban any construction taller than four stories--or, as they put it, “higher than a palm tree.”

The walls were torn out of Baldwin’s car rental office, and the corrugated roof collapsed on his cars, which he was letting people drive free to help with the recovery.

Although some resorts were devastated, guests at the Westin Kauai hotel near the Lihue Airport said it escaped with a destroyed roof and a swimming pool full of mud. “We went out during the eye (of the hurricane),” said Norman Howell, a stuntman for director Steven Spielberg, who was staying at the hotel with the cast and crew for his new movie, “Jurassic Park.”

The film is an adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel about modern-day dinosaurs. Iniki struck on what was to have been the last day of shooting.

“Steve was out there (in the eye), and (producer) Kathleen Kennedy was yelling at him to come back inside,” Howell said. “Just at that time, it started to kick up again from the opposite direction. The wind was enough to knock you over. We were running, trying to get back inside.”

Everybody made it, Howell said. “There were no injuries, and everyone from ‘Jurassic Park’ is fine.”

In downtown Lihue, picnic tables were overturned, palm trees lay on their sides and utility poles were scattered in a jumbled mess. Red tiles were strewn about, torn from the roof of the county courthouse.

The smokestack at the Lihue sugar mill was sheared off.

“The sound (of the hurricane) was so frightening--the horrible roaring,” said Joan Crawford, as she surveyed the damage to her bookstore. “It was so deafening!

“It went on, it seemed like, forever.”

“It was awful,” agreed Lois Fuji, an elementary school teacher. “It was indescribable. It was just like a war with bombs exploding. It was awful, awful, awful.

“We’re just grateful we’re alive.”

Some residents of Kauai were hardly so lucky. Mayor Yukimura said the two fatalities on the island were a man in his 90s who was hit by flying debris and a woman in her 70s whose house collapsed on her.

But others thought themselves uncommonly fortunate.

“You’d see one house totally untouched, the next one destroyed,” Yukimura said. “It’s just like the toss of a coin.”

Andy Ferrara’s home was only damaged. He and his daughter pulled a couch out of his living room. “I’ll send this to Hurricane Andrew victims,” he said, because many of them were not as lucky.

Mattresses were popular emergency buffers. Many people stacked them and hid underneath. Libert Nakaahiki, a retiree, whose home was nearly destroyed, said: “I took one of my mattresses and put it over the dining table. We hid underneath. All of a sudden, the wind just lifted up some lumber, and it (the hurricane) just came--boom! boom! boom!--and ripped off the roof a little at a time.

“I looked up from under the table, and I could see the sky. Then my garage went down. We just lay under the table. It was raining too, and everything was getting wet.

“But we’re all safe.”

Some simply left things to fate.

Douglas Albrecht runs a livery. He has carriages and six Clydesdale horses for hire to tourists who want to see the island.

As Iniki approached, he turned the Clydesdales loose in their pasture.

“They’re all right,” he reported, happily. “We just turned them loose, because that’s the best thing for horses.”

At the resort of Poipu on the south shore, George Gonzalez, a doorman at the 600-room Hyatt Regency Kauai, said that hotel employees led guests into its main ballroom.

“Then the top skylight blew out,” he said. “So we had to move everybody into the tunnel underneath.” Fifty doctors were at the hotel for a convention. They set up a first aid station, but it was not needed.

Corey Medeiros, who lives nearby, said most homes at Poipu Beach lost roofs. “It’s flat,” he said, describing the damage. “It’s nothing.

“We have a house,” he added, then corrected himself. “We had a house. The house blew about 50 feet backward.” But he said an odd thing happened: An arrangement of tropical flowers in a delicate vase survived in his bathroom.

On her return from a tour of the island, Mayor Yukimura described huge chunks of coastline that fell into the sea.

“The Na Pali coast looked like it had aged a century,” she declared. “I saw total devastation. It broke my heart. Our beautiful island is devastated . . . . There is incredible human suffering at this point in terms of loss of homes and property.”

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.

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.”

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.

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

Storm Steamrolls Hawaii’s ‘Garden Island’

Forecasters said Iniki’s eye struck hardest on the less-developed western side of Kauai, known as Hawaii’s “Garden Island” because of its lush terrain and breathtaking scenery. It is the least populated of the four major islands. Volcanic mountains and pristine beaches on 30-mile-wide island draw thousands of tourists in the fall from the U.S. mainland, Australia and Japan:

1. Heavy damage was reported in Poipu resort area on Kauai’s southern tip

2. Kauai’s west side also suffered heavy damage, according to a radio operator on the island.

3. Lihue Airport, its control tower knocked out, was ordered closed to civilian aircraft.

4. A reportes for the Honolulu Advertiser reported by radio that as many as a third of Kauai’s homes suffered severe damage and that destruction was visible everywhere.

5. Roads was impassable and numerous telephone poles were down, state Civil Defense officials said.