Hawaiʻi, Hurricanes, and Designing for Resilience: Reflections From a Place That Helped Shape My Life and Career - by Lucian Toma

Hawaiʻi has held a very special place in my heart for a long time. I lived on Oʻahu for about seven years while attending Hawaiʻi Pacific University, and during those years I had the opportunity to travel regularly throughout the islands. For several years I also lived with a Hawaiian family. That experience gave me a relationship with Hawaiʻi that went far beyond attending school or simply living in an extraordinarily beautiful place. The land, the culture, the people, the climate, the food, the ocean, and the ways community and place intersect all influenced the person I was becoming.

Hawaiʻi was also where I first encountered permaculture, both as a concept and in practice. At the time, I could not have known how deeply that encounter would influence the direction of my life. Over the years, permaculture grew into regenerative landscape design, farming, soil work, education, consulting, and a much broader interest in how we design not only landscapes, but communities, businesses, and lives. In some ways, many of the ideas that now sit at the center of my work - observation before intervention, working with natural patterns, understanding relationships, community, resourcefulness, and thinking in whole systems - felt less like entirely new ideas and more like things resurfacing from my childhood in Romania. I had grown up around a culture where gardens, food, family, neighbors, seasonal rhythms, making use of what was available, and a close relationship with land were simply part of everyday life. Hawaiʻi brought many of those threads back to the surface in a different cultural and ecological setting, and it was during those years that they began to take much deeper root in me and develop into a conscious way of seeing, designing, and eventually working in the world.

Today, I am once again spending more time thinking about Hawaiʻi. I am currently working on several land-based design projects there and expect to be visiting the islands more regularly moving forward. With Hurricane Lala affecting Hawaiʻi, particularly Hawaiʻi Island, I found myself thinking about the event not only as a storm, but as a design question:

• What can history teach us about hurricanes in Hawaiʻi?
• What helps communities recover well after a major storm?
• And perhaps most importantly: what would it look like to intentionally design homes, farms, neighborhoods, community spaces, infrastructure, and emergency systems so that they are better prepared for the next one?

Those questions led me to initiate an AI-assisted research process, reviewing historical hurricane information, weather and emergency-management data, recovery reports, infrastructure impacts, and resilience practices. I began organizing that information into three visual guides. They are not intended as comprehensive engineering documents or final prescriptions. They are starting points for conversation—an attempt to take a large amount of information and make some of it easier to see, discuss, question, and build upon.

1. What Can 50 Years of Hurricanes Tell Us?
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The first graphic looks backward. I wanted to understand the major hurricanes and hurricane-related events that have significantly affected Hawaiʻi over roughly the past 50 years: when they happened, their strength, which islands were affected, the damage they caused, power disruptions, deaths, flooding, and how long recovery took. A few things immediately stand out:

1. Direct hurricane strikes on the Hawaiian Islands are relatively uncommon when compared with many other tropical regions. But uncommon does not mean impossible, and historical rarity can sometimes create its own vulnerability if buildings, infrastructure, or communities gradually begin to assume that a major event is unlikely. The historical record also reminds us that hurricane category alone does not tell the entire story.
2. Some of Hawaiʻi's most serious tropical-cyclone impacts have come through rainfall, flooding, high surf, falling trees, damaged utility systems, road closures, agricultural losses, and long-duration power outages. A storm does not need to place its eye directly over a community to profoundly disrupt life there.
3. Hurricane Iniki in 1992 remains the clearest modern example of how severe the consequences can become. Other storms, including Iselle, Lane, Hone, and now Lala, demonstrate different forms of vulnerability: flooding, infrastructure failure, crop loss, downed vegetation, isolated communities, and prolonged utility disruption.

There are also patterns worth examining around El Niño and broader Pacific conditions. Historical patterns do not guarantee what will happen in the future, and changing climate conditions, ocean temperatures, development patterns, and infrastructure mean the future will not necessarily behave exactly like the past. 

​The History of a place gives us something extremely valuable in design: a pattern to observe and help us design with resilience for the future. ​​

2. Recovery Is a Community Design Problem
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The second graphic turns from history to the present. In the immediate aftermath of a major storm, the needs become much more human and practical:

• Is everyone safe?
• Who has water?
• Who has electricity?
• Which roads are passable?
• Who needs food, medication, shelter, transportation, childcare, animal care, or help cleaning their property?
• Who is isolated?
• Who has equipment?
• Who has skills?
• Who simply needs another person to show up?

​One of the things I continue to appreciate about regenerative design is that it teaches us not to think only about objects. A house is not just a house. A road is not simply a road. A water tank is not simply a container. They are parts of systems. The same is true of disaster recovery.

Recovery is not only the work of emergency agencies or utility companies. It is a network of government, first responders, churches, nonprofits, businesses, farmers, equipment operators, medical providers, neighbors, families, and volunteers.

Sometimes the most valuable form of help is remarkably simple: bringing drinking water to someone without it, preparing food, checking on an elderly neighbor, helping remove wet material from a home, clearing debris, providing a generator, watching someone's children while they deal with damage, offering temporary housing, or helping somebody navigate assistance paperwork.

At the same time, uncoordinated help can create additional problems. Flooded areas, unstable trees, downed electrical lines, landslides, contaminated water, and damaged structures remain dangerous after the wind stops. 

• That means effective mutual aid has to combine generosity with coordination.
• Before showing up with equipment or supplies, ask what is actually needed.
• Before cutting trees, understand where power lines are.
• Before driving into a damaged community, make sure additional traffic will not interfere with emergency access.
• Before donating material goods, find out whether those particular goods are useful.
• Sometimes the best donation is money to a trusted local organization. Sometimes it is a chainsaw crew. Sometimes it is a pallet of water. Sometimes it is opening a spare room to a family for several nights.

Resilience is partly about infrastructure. But it is also about relationships. A community where people already know one another, communicate, share skills, understand who is vulnerable, and have practiced helping each other is fundamentally more resilient than a collection of isolated households.

3. Designing Now for the Hurricane That Has Not Arrived Yet

The third graphic asks the question I find most interesting as a designer: What would it look like to design for the next hurricane before it exists? I divided this into several scales because resilience cannot be created at only one level.

The household level

​At the household or property level, many of the most important interventions are not particularly glamorous:

• Roof-to-wall connections matter. Roof fasteners matter. Carports and large overhangs matter. Window and door protection matter. Drainage matters. The placement and anchoring of propane tanks, water tanks, sheds, greenhouses, solar equipment, and outdoor materials matters. Backup water matters. Backup electricity matters. Knowing where water will flow across a property during an extreme rainfall event matters enormously.

For rural properties, farms, and homesteads, this expands into another set of questions:

• Can the water system operate without grid power? Is there stored potable water? Can animals be moved into protected areas? Can greenhouses withstand high winds? Are access roads vulnerable to erosion? Where does runoff concentrate? Could culverts become blocked? Are large trees positioned where their failure could damage homes, tanks, fences, or power systems?

There may also be opportunities to learn from local materials and long-standing building traditions. Hawaiʻi Island has an extraordinary abundance of lava rock, and rock walls are already a familiar part of the landscape. In certain settings, thoughtfully engineered rock walls, windbreaks, berms, or protected spaces might become part of resilient site design. But these ideas need to be approached carefully. A heavy wall that performs well against wind still has to behave safely during earthquakes and volcanic tremors. It also cannot unintentionally redirect floodwater toward a home. Which leads to an important Big Island principle:

Do not design for hurricanes in isolation. Design for wind, water, earthquakes, volcanic activity, fire, access, and long-term maintenance together.

​The community level

At the community scale, I think one of the strongest opportunities is the development of multi-use resilience spaces. Instead of building an emergency shelter that sits mostly unused until a disaster occurs, what if the same building functioned every week? (This is already practiced on every Hawaiian island at different scales):

An emergency shelter can be a multi-use resilience space: It could be a community center. A church hall. A classroom. A workshop space. A farmers' meeting space. A place for youth activities. A commercial kitchen. A training center. And during a major storm, it could transition into a hardened shelter equipped with backup power, water storage, sanitation, communication equipment, food storage, medical supplies, and charging capacity. That is a classic regenerative design idea: stack functions. The building does not serve one purpose. It serves many.

• Community preparedness should also happen long before hurricane season. Regular workshops could teach first aid, generator safety, family evacuation planning, chainsaw safety, water storage, home retrofits, flood awareness, and post-storm cleanup.
• Neighborhoods could maintain voluntary lists of people who have tractors, chainsaws, trucks, generators, medical training, spare rooms, livestock trailers, cooking facilities, or other useful resources.
• Equally important would be knowing ahead of time who may need help: kūpuna, people with disabilities, medically vulnerable residents, families without transportation, and people living in remote locations.

Much of disaster resilience can be designed before any disaster occurs simply by strengthening social connections.

The county level​

At the county level, resilience becomes partly an infrastructure and planning question. Roads, culverts, bridges, drainage systems, water systems, communication networks, emergency shelters, and power infrastructure become critical. These are the questions that lead that planning:

• Where are the roads most likely to wash out?
• Which communities could become geographically isolated?
• Where should emergency equipment be staged before the storm?
• Where are backup shelter locations?
• Which water systems depend completely on grid electricity?
• Where could distributed solar and battery systems support critical infrastructure?
• Which neighborhoods have only one practical access route?
• Which bridges, slopes, or drainage channels represent potential failure points?

County-level preparedness could also include stronger retrofit programs for existing homes and small businesses, public education around resilient construction, and perhaps incentives or technical assistance for homeowners making hurricane-strengthening improvements.

Preparedness should not begin with a forecast cone. It should be part of normal planning.

The state level

At the state level, Hawaiʻi faces a challenge that is different from almost anywhere else in the United States: island geography.

Major disasters can affect ports, airports, fuel supply, food distribution, telecommunications, electrical generation, and movement between islands simultaneously. This makes redundancy extremely important. The following are not only emergency-management questions. They are design questions.

• How much food, fuel, medical material, repair equipment, and emergency water exists locally if transportation is interrupted?
• How quickly can utility crews or specialized equipment move between islands?
• What happens when a harbor or airport is temporarily unavailable?
• How can distributed energy systems reduce dependence on centralized infrastructure?
• How can schools, public buildings, healthcare facilities, and emergency shelters be designed not only to survive an event, but to continue functioning afterward?

Resilience Is More Than Stronger Buildings

There is a temptation when discussing hurricanes to focus entirely on construction. Construction matters enormously. But resilient communities require more than stronger roofs. They require communication. Relationships. Education. Stored resources. Healthy ecosystems. Reliable water. Local food systems. Energy redundancy. Transportation options. People who know their neighbors. Institutions that have practiced working together. And perhaps most importantly, a culture that takes preparation seriously without living in fear.

One of the permaculture principles that has influenced me most to see resilience design in this way is observe and interact. Observe what the system is telling you. Interact thoughtfully. Observe the result. Adjust. That approach feels particularly relevant here. Every storm teaches something, and those learning lessons must be noted:

• Where did water go? Which trees failed? Which roofs survived? Which roads became impassable? Which communication systems worked? Which neighborhoods organized quickly? Which communities struggled to access food, power, or water?

Every one of those observations can become information for the next design.

There Is Much More to Learn

These three graphics are only a beginning. There is much more research that could be done around resilient tropical architecture, utility systems, water storage, food security, agroforestry, community shelter design, rural road access, and landscape strategies for extreme rainfall and wind.

There is also another body of knowledge that deserves much deeper attention when designing land and life in Hawai'i with resilience in mind: the accumulated knowledge of Native Hawaiian culture and generations of people who have lived with these islands, their weather, their watersheds, their winds, their geology, and their ecological patterns.

I do not want to pretend that a few days of research - or a decade of professional design experience elsewhere - can substitute for that place-based knowledge. It cannot. One of the most important parts of good design is recognizing what you do not yet know.

As I spend more time working on land-based projects in Hawaiʻi, I want to continue learning from local builders, farmers, emergency responders, Native Hawaiian practitioners, cultural knowledge holders, scientists, land stewards, families, and residents who have lived through these events firsthand.

If you live in Hawaiʻi - especially if you have experienced Iniki, Iselle, Lane, Hone, Lala, or other major storms - I would genuinely appreciate hearing what experience has taught you.

• What worked? What failed? What should every homeowner know? What should every community have ready? What traditional knowledge or local practice belongs in this conversation? What infrastructure improvements would make the biggest difference?
• And what am I missing?

Hawaiʻi helped shape my life many years ago, and I carry a great deal of gratitude for that. My hope in sharing this work is simply to contribute something useful—to listen, learn, ask better design questions, and support the larger work of protecting these extraordinary islands and helping them become even more resilient and regenerative for the people of Hawaiʻi.

The best time to design for the next hurricane is before we know its name.

Continue Exploring Regenerative Design

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