After the Storm – The New York Times

After the storm

Hurricane Lala tore past the Big Island of Hawaii last weekend, dropped three feet of rain and left a path of ruins that residents will be working for months to fix.

Times journalists yesterday reported on two places where that work’s afoot. One story’s a feel-good portrait of the Hawaiian principles of aloha, which means love and comp***ion, and ohana, which means family and community. The other might break your heart.

At the gas station

Orlando Mayorquín, a reporter in our Los Angeles bureau, traveled to a small mountain town on the southern end of the island to write about the parking lot of the Ocean View Market gas station, where locals this week set up a spontaneous disaster relief center.

What he found was remarkable. The gas station was closed. Tim Reed, an Ocean View resident who runs a low-power radio station that usually plays Hawaiian music and cl***ic rock, had connected his equipment to a satellite to broadcast information about the hub — including his offer to let residents connect to the internet via Starlink and make calls to the outside world. “We’re the emergency communication for Ocean View,” he told Orlando.

Katie Tyner, another resident, had become “the gas lady.” Orlando found her standing next to her S.U.V., writing down names and numbers on a clipboard. “Her operation was simple and in high demand in a community where many do not own cars,” Orlando reported: “Hand her cash and a fuel can and she would return with gas from an operational station half an hour up the road.”

There was Pamela Ako, a pastor, handing out water bottles and accepting food and supplies for people who might need them: batteries, rice flour, instant Korean noodles, rope. “It’s people helping people,” she told Orlando. “This is when we come together as a family. You talk about aloha; you talk about ohana — this is what it’s all about.”

Kahi Young rolled up then. He had persuaded a local helicopter tour company to bring supplies to another small town, about 25 miles away. The aircraft would arrive soon in a nearby park, and Young needed help loading hundreds of pounds of food and gear. Ako sent him to Reed, who put him on air.

Soon volunteers were filling the helicopter with boxes of toilet paper and baby wipes, along with lots of ready-to-eat food.

Read more about the scene in Ocean View here.

Cemetery road

Meghan Miner Murray, a journalist in Hawaii who contributes to The Times, reported from the hamlet of Naalehu, roughly 12 miles east of Ocean View. Flooding from the storm inundated a small cemetery there, pulling both gravestones and coffins from the earth and leaving behind a sea of mud and wreckage.

The scene was chilling. What Meghan saw: “A body stripped of clothes lay crushed beneath a boulder. About a half dozen caskets were visible, most empty and torn apart. The smell of the unearthed dead suffused parts of the debris field.” Flotsam was everywhere. She saw refrigerators in the mud, clothes, a sodden mattress, a hammer.

Families searched the site, looking for the graves of their loved ones. Maka Gallinger came with eight of her relatives. “We’re going to find my mom,” she told Meghan. “We got to know. We’ve got to take care of our family bones.”

All was not horror, though. Gallinger’s mother’s grave, at least, was untouched. “Here she is,” Gallinger said when she found it. “All right, Mom. We’re just checking.”

Read more about the search for the dead here.

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THE MORNING QUIZ

This question comes from a recent edition of the newsletter. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)

Underneath a defunct brewery in Belgium, construction workers recently discovered …

OPINIONS

American leftists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have finally admitted that the “Woke 1.0” era was crazy, Bret Stephens writes. But where is the accountability for its harms?

“Modern social clubs,” exercise “cults” and start-ups that offer to “find your people” won’t solve the loneliness epidemic on their own, Christine Emba argues.

MORNING READS

Taking dictation: Amy X. Wang “wrote” an article for The Times about voice-to-text apps, using a voice-to-text app. It’s hilarious: “I wish I could describe elegantly how much I hate it with some kind of handy, clever metaphor,” she said, “but that kind of creativity comes to me through writing with my hands.”

“Everything looked like me”: Meena Geltink and Minal Tijssen were adopted from India by families in the Netherlands and became friends as teenagers. Years later, they discovered they were sisters.

Working-cl*** lit: Chinese gig workers and factory laborers are turning stories from their tedious, low-paid jobs into best-sellers.

Drummer: Frank Beard, the only beardless member of ZZ Top, propelled the band’s blend of boogie, Southern rock and blues for more than a half-century. He died at 77.

TODAY’S NUMBER

$38

— That is the cost of the brisket sandwich at Yerord Mas Bakery and Deli, an Armenian restaurant in a strip mall in Los Angeles. It is magnificent, writes our critic Tejal Rao, and controversy over its price is misguided: “Want to try and guess which restaurant served me a small and profoundly forgettable dish the other night for this exact price? It’s impossible because there are so many offenders peddling mid pastas and roast chicken.”

I love Kevin Pang’s recipe for sesame soy chicken with ginger-scallion noodles, in part because you don’t need to make it with chicken, nor with noodles. As long as you have the ginger-scallion sauce as a keystone, you’ll be eating well. (Last night’s attempt had me serving it over rice and a fried egg, with dried seaweed flakes and a flash of soy sauce.) Man, it’s good with the chicken and noodles, though.

AWARDS SEASON

The actor Colman Domingo stopped by The Times’s newsroom the other day to talk about his twin Emmy nominations for “Euphoria” and “The Four Seasons.” He’s stoked. “For a boy who comes from the inner city of West Philadelphia, who had no access into this whole industry, who’s been in this for over 30 years,” he said, “for me to get to the Emmy stage, even to get to a nomination, is just extraordinary.” Read the conversation here.

More on culture

• Caitlin Simmers, a champion surfer and favorite for the 2028 Olympics, sees her sport as a form of dance, our critic Gia Kourlas writes. She performs with a rare style that is both seamless and fearless as she pushes through waves by dancing on them. Instead of music, she listens to the ocean. Check her out.

• Is it the summer of the blockual guru? Movies like “The Invite,” “I Want Your Sex” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” sure seem to make the case.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS

Help your kids manage their screen time (help yourself, too), with advice from the tech-savvy parental units at Wirecutter.

Read “No Orchids for Miss Blandish,” a hard-boiled crime novel by James Hadley Chase about the kidnapping of a wealthy heiress, published in 1939. It’s worth tracking down. The sentences sing: “Bailey was feeling lousy. Hard liquor and heat don’t mix. His mouth felt like a birdcage and his eyes were gritty.”

Eat carrots. They really are good for your eyes.

GAMES