Site for new North Shore fire station deemed unusable

HONOLULU (KHON2) — Fire Station 14 Waialua is quite old, in fact, for the last 90 years it’s been sitting in a flood and tsunami zone. It’s right at the cusp of Waialua and Haleiwa town and the acquired land was about a mile and a half closer to Waialua, but now it’s up in the air where the new fire station could be.

In April 2020 the Caldwell administration announced Honolulu Fire Department acquired five acres from Dole for 1.3 million dollars in the heart of Waialua for a new state-of-the-art station.

But in January 2022, HFD’s new administration realized the land was in a tsunami evacuation zone.

“There was an oversight on that property, basically it’s in a tsunami zone so we can’t build a fire station on that property,” said Acting Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Mokulehua.

“My first concern I guess is what you call oversight I call a lack of accountability and what will prevent that from the next place,” said a North Shore resident.

In a recent neighborhood board meeting the acting assistant fire chief said there are two main factors when determining where a new station should go — one is response time.

In the image above, anything in green takes less than four minutes to respond. Red is considered not good and can take up to seven minutes to respond to an emergency.

“It will benefit everybody, they did show us numbers when they did a presentation I believe back in January and the bulk of the calls were in the Waialua area,” said North Shore Neighborhood Board Chair Kathleen Pahinui.

The ideal location was this land sold by Dole at Goodale Avenue and Waialua Beach Road.

Other potential sites were across from Weed Circle or further down Kaukonahua road.

HFD made this statement:

HFD builds stations to last a very long time and we want this station to serve as a regional emergency depot location where it will be stocked with emergency equipment to be more efficient during natural or man-made disasters.

In an email, HFD said no new land has been purchased at this time and they hope to have a new Waialua fire station built within the next 10 years.

“We want to find a solution to this we want to move forward and we can get the community a fire station in suitable area,” said Mokulehua.