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In 1976, Typhoon Pamela lashed my island home for 18 hours with strong winds. I saw entire roofs ripped off homes by winds, unlike what I’ve experienced before. Memories of howling wind, torrential rain, and flying debris remain vivid.

When the storm passed, most of Guam’s structures were damaged — over 3,000 homes were destroyed, and the energy grid was laid waste. The recovery effort was long — before water and power returned, and infrastructure took years to restore. (My middle school would not reopen until six years later.)

Hawaii experienced a similar disaster with in 1992. This Category 4 storm damaged over 14,000 homes, destroying over 1,400 of them and leaving many people homeless. It took several months for electricity service to be restored entirely, and some key structures have not been rebuilt.

Are we ready for the next big hurricane?

Hawaii’s State building code requires new structures to withstand Category 3 hurricane wind damage. Given the increasing intensity of hurricanes, we should anticipate Category 4 and 5 storms. These will bring wind speeds and storm surges, compromising even newly built homes across Hawaii.

Notably, many older homes, perhaps over 50% of housing stock, must be retrofitted to enable resistance to winds from hurricanes (even the “milder” Category 3 variety). Many are single-wall structures that will require significant remodeling.

Are we ready? Perhaps not.

Should a powerful hurricane make landfall, we can expect heavy damage to homes and infrastructure. As with Pamela and Iniki, social and economic disruption may last long after the storm. Such a disaster may require sheltering over a hundred thousand people, possibly for many weeks or months.

Hawaii is undoubtedly vulnerable to hurricanes and other intense weather events. Our changed climate will result in more frequent and intense storms, flooding, heat waves, and wildfires. To protect our communities and economy, we must minimize the impact of these disasters and enable prompt recovery after each one. We must prepare for the worst scenarios.

Preparing For The Big One

The state is prioritizing adaptation and resiliency. Gov. Josh Green’s is tasked with developing a climate resilience policy, strategy, and a roadmap to enable Hawaii to “mitigate the financial impact of climate change,” according to the governor’s May 2024 press release.

The release emphasizes the commitment to “maintaining stable housing and insurance markets.” The plans must include climate-proofing our homes, buildings, and infrastructure and ensuring robust disaster preparedness and recovery capacity.

Executing the plan will inevitably span decades, so a long-term roadmap is needed, along with near-term interventions, e.g., disaster-preparedness education and storm-proofing of homes, designed to maximize the protection of our community.

A critical intervention is establishing an adequate emergency shelter network across the state. This network should be able to provide essential services (shelter, food, water, energy) to thousands of people during a significant disaster event. Importantly, our shelter capacity is wanting. The inadequacy of our shelters has been communicated over the years, including in which suggested sheltering capacity on Oahu alone is insufficient and that existing shelters require retrofits to withstand hurricane winds.

Emergency Sheltering

Schools are ideal shelter locations as they are ubiquitous in our communities.

According to the State Risk Management office, the Department of Education hosts most of the state’s buildings — over 4,000 of roughly 7,000, many of which are schools. Most of our emergency shelters are already located in schools.

With proper infrastructure hardening, energy systems, and purpose-built sheltering capabilities, our public schools can provide our communities with critical sheltering during and after a significant disaster. In addition to spaces that can be configured for shelters, many schools have commercial kitchens and cafeterias, parking, established ingress and egress, lighting and other security measures, and spaces to host photovoltaic and energy storage solutions. 

Energy storage is essential to ensure round-the-clock energy access when the grid is down. The proposed microgrid can include storage in the form of batteries and even electric buses. Electric buses have huge batteries —over 600 kWh, enough to power a home for over a month.

A fleet of electric buses can help support a shelter’s energy needs by storing excess solar-generated power during the day and dispensing it when solar production is low. These buses can power a school with technology connecting them to its electrical system. Notably, Hawaii has already begun transitioning its bus fleet to battery electric, and we will see more of these large “batteries on wheels” as part of our energy transition.

This energy infrastructure — a microgrid, stationary batteries, and electric buses — will allow a school to have power even when the electricity grid is down for a long time, providing the community with power for communication, life-saving equipment, food preparation, and security.

One Stone, Two Birds

Retrofitting schools to serve as resilient emergency shelters will also greatly enhance our learning and teaching experiences at our schools.

It is well known that many of our classrooms are only naturally ventilated and can become unbearably hot, humid, and uncomfortable. This makes it difficult for our keiki to learn and for our teachers to teach.

The problem and the need for air conditioning have been well covered in media reports, and they will only increase in significance as temperatures rise. To solve this problem, the state must install many air-conditioning systems in thousands of classrooms and address the electricity demand of these air conditioning units.

The energy system proposed for emergency shelters can also provide electricity to cover the increased energy load of the air-conditioned school. Many of Hawaii’s schools have applied to the Hawaii Department of Education’s . An essential requirement is the school’s electrical capacity to handle the extra energy load of air conditioning, which many schools lack.

Paying For Investments

Capital will be required to outfit each school — significant investment will be needed in structural hardening and retrofitting, energy microgrids, energy storage, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, and electric buses. Fortunately, there are funding mechanisms available today to address these investments.

Federal incentives are currently available and can cover much of the costs of clean energy systems and electric buses. The , for instance, can cover up to 50% of the cost of renewable energy production and storage solutions and facility retrofitting needed to support solar photovoltaic infrastructure. Federal clean transportation incentives cover zero-emission vehicles, including buses and charging infrastructure.

Additionally, there are private-public partnership opportunities to cover these infrastructure investments with minimum government capital outlay. The Hawaii Department of Transportation is leveraging such a mechanism ()  to deploy zero-emission vehicles, charging infrastructure, and microgrids without taking on debt or worrying about long-term maintenance and upgrade cycles.

Lastly, the energy savings associated with a school’s microgrid will naturally reduce the facility’s operating expenses.

Climate disasters are inevitable. Let’s be ready.

The climate crisis is our existential threat. We must accelerate efforts to reduce emissions and draw down legacy pollution to avoid even more egregious disasters and tipping points that can irreversibly change our ecosystems. At the same time, we must prepare for the inevitable disasters resulting from the pollution already dumped into our atmosphere.

A network of robust emergency shelters across our state can ensure we are prepared to respond to the inevitable superstorms and other natural disasters. These shelters will create safe spaces for hundreds of thousands of people to survive and recover from a massive disaster, even if recovery takes months. 

Let’s invest in resilient emergency shelters. Let’s be ready for the next big one.