Burden for preventing drownings in Hawaii falls on counties — and residents
Rachel Able stood scanning Kohanaiki Beach, her stomach in knots as she looked out across the sparkling waves and rocky tide pools on the western shore of the Big Island.
It was the first time she’d been back since her 15-year-old daughter Lily died in a surfing accident at the sheltered bay several weeks earlier, and the grieving mother was searching for answers — anything that could explain how such a popular beach had turned deadly.
“Where were the warning signs?” she wanted to know.
In hindsight, Kohanaiki Beach had come with a false sense of security. It’s a locals’ spot with consistent waves and a campground with a security patrol. A place where families come for birthday parties and after-school surfing sessions.
But as she walked down the narrow, manicured road along the beach north of Kona, things stood out to Able that she hadn’t noticed before. There was no lifeguard tower. No orange and yellow metal signs on the beach cautioning people about the criss-crossing rip currents and colliding waves that break onto a shallow reef. No indication that other people had drowned there before Lily’s accident in 2022.
Able left the shore that day determined to get a lifeguard tower built on the beach that took her daughter’s life. She talked to the police, then the county parks department, fire chief, the mayor’s office and county council members. She didn’t meet any resistance. In fact, the county parks director told her that he didn’t understand why there wasn’t a lifeguard stand there already.
“That was the frustrating part for me,” she said, “because it’s like, OK, you guys saw it, too.”
Hawaiʻi has the second highest rate of resident drownings in the nation, but there’s been no serious statewide effort to address the problem. Instead, ocean safety efforts are left up to individual counties, leading to big disparities in drowning prevention across the islands. The state, which is supposed to lead injury prevention, does little to help them.
The Department of Land and Natural Resources chooses locations for signs signaling dangerous conditions, but the group that decides where signs should go hasn’t met in more than a decade. The state Department of Health is charged with creating injury prevention plans, but hasn’t done so in several years and dedicated less than 0.01% of its annual budget to drowning prevention in 2024, even though it is the leading cause of death for children in Hawai‘i.
As a result, it has often fallen to community members — in many cases, people grieving unimaginable loss — to push for basic ocean safety improvements. An emergency room doctor on Kauaʻi helped get flotation devices, also know as rescue tubes, installed across the island. The parents of a child who fell to his death while hiking in 1997 purchased a helicopter and jet skis for Hawaiʻi County Fire Department rescue operations on land, like their son’s accident, and in the ocean. A woman whose husband and daughter were swept out to sea now leads drowning prevention at the Department of Health.
But without larger institutional support, those community-led efforts rarely get the traction needed to jolt the state into action. The health department’s injury prevention branch spent just $80,000 on drowning initiatives last fiscal year.
Beyond the efforts of lifeguards to warn beachgoers before they get into trouble, Hawaiʻi has done “almost nothing on the prevention side,” said Jessamy Hornor, whose husband and daughter were swept out to sea by a rogue wave on Oʻahu in 2016.
Hornor, who became the state’s drowning prevention coordinator in October, wants to do more to bring together nonprofits, counties and state agencies to make greater progress toward addressing the problem.
“Given the scale of the need, we need to scale up our solutions as well,” she said.
After Lily’s accident, Able persuaded the county to step up. But it still took more than two years for a lifeguard tower to go up at Kohanaiki.
A Duty To Warn The Public
Hawaiʻi’s lifeguards and emergency services are managed and funded at the county level. Neighbor islands, in particular, feel the impact of funding and staffing crunches. Things that work on Oʻahu, like stationing lifeguards in the 911 dispatch center to take calls related to ocean safety, just don’t work in places with smaller staffs.
“If there were any lifeguards in the dispatch, I’ll probably take them out, because I’ll need them more on the beach,” said Kalani Vierra, the chief of ocean safety on Kauaʻi and the president of the Hawaiʻi Lifeguard Association, a nonprofit that supports the state’s lifeguards and efforts to decrease drownings.
There’s little state tracking of why some places have more success than others. Kauaʻi, which has so few resident drownings it can’t calculate a drowning rate, relies heavily on rescue tubes. On Maui, most people who drown are tourists, but no one seems to know why the county has a lower rate of resident deaths.
Among the islands, the drowning mortality rate on the Big Island, which has 266 miles of often-remote coastline and until earlier this month had the smallest ocean safety staff of any county, is second only to Oʻahu’s and more than four times the state’s goal established in 2005. Only 13 beaches on the island have lifeguards.
“Definitely having more lifeguards at the beaches helps, having signage helps,” said Kazuo Todd, chief of the Hawaiʻi County Fire Department, which oversees the ocean safety division. But it depends on the island’s population and tax base. “Hawaiʻi island is one of the most cash-strapped islands.”
While Honolulu County uses lifeguards on jet skis and lieutenants in pickup trucks to patrol long stretches of unguarded coastline, the Big Island doesn’t have any mobile units. It’s just not practical given the distance between the island’s beaches, Todd said.
Where a lifeguard can’t be there to protect people, the next best thing is to warn them. It’s not just best practice: In Hawaiʻi, state and county governments have a legal duty to warn the public about dangerous conditions at public beach parks.
But the state’s involvement in prevention and education has been minimal, particularly when it comes to informing locals. Efforts have been largely perfunctory, underfunded and — when it comes to a legal mandate to decide where to place warning signs — ignored, according to ocean safety and health officials, to the point where leaders have dropped out of key initiatives because they were so discouraged.
Across the islands, orange and yellow signs dot the state’s coastline, warning beachgoers of the hazards of the islands’ waters with messages like “STRONG CURRENT — You could be swept away from shore and could drown. If in doubt, don’t go out.” Or “DANGEROUS SHOREBREAK: Waves break in shallow water. Serious injuries could occur, even in small surf.”
The beach where Lily Able died had two signs near the entrance to the park, but none posted on the beach itself or the pathway leading to it. The state task force in charge of determining where the signs should go hasn’t met in over a decade, according to records submitted to the Legislature.
A primary purpose of these signs is to protect the state and counties from legal liability and lawsuits, according to ocean safety experts. For years, counties faced lawsuits over a failure to warn beachgoers about strong rip tides or surf breaks that shatter spinal cords. So in 1996, the Legislature passed a law requiring state or county governments to hang semi-permanent signs at public beach parks. Lifeguards also put up temporary signs to warn of the conditions on a given day, but the signs are often taken down at night.
“It made a difference in the number of claims that have been filed,” said Ralph Goto, who led the ocean safety efforts in Honolulu County from 1981 to 2013 and served on the task force for several years. “Have they reduced the number of injuries? I don’t know.”
The Task Force on Beach and Water Safety, which was also created by the Legislature in 1996, is supposed to help the state Board of Land and Natural Resources decide where to hang these signs around the islands. No new signs have gone up at the recommendation of the task force in more than a decade.
The requirement also only applies to public beach parks. That means long stretches of the state’s coastline don’t have any warning signs about big swells or dangerous currents. On the Big Island, some popular fishing spots or surf breaks don’t have any indication of the risks people are taking.
Oʻahu does have more warning signs, but even then, there are issues. The signs are supposed to be visible as people walk down to the beach. But at many spots across the North Shore, the signs are facing the parking lot but aren’t near the stairs or the walkways down to the beach, allowing people to get to the water without ever coming across a warning that it might be dangerous. At popular surf spots, the signs are covered in stickers and are barely legible. Lifeguards routinely go around with a paint scraper peeling off stickers.
Even when the signs are legible, Goto says they aren’t enough.
“How is that going to modify your behavior, your intent?” Goto said. “Signs don’t rescue people. Lifeguards rescue people.”
Still, the signs are another layer of caution, and ocean leaders like Goto are frustrated that DLNR has failed to assess their locations for so long. Some see it as another indication that the state has not been proactive when it comes to ocean safety.
In 2015, the state created a health department-led committee to reduce drownings and ocean-related spinal cord injuries. It had some initial progress with projects like a website with ocean safety tips and a list of beaches with lifeguards. That momentum fizzled, according to Gerald Kosaki, the former Hawaiʻi County battalion chief in charge of ocean safety who led the Drowning and Aquatic Injury Advisory Committee in its early years.
It felt like “this losing battle,” he said. “That’s why I left. I felt like I wasn’t really having an impact.”
The group stopped meeting for several years during the pandemic, and has been slow to get back up and running.
“It was kind of tough,” Kosaki said. “Because we’re trying to save lives, and just like, we weren’t having the support needed.”
Even where there is state involvement in drowning prevention, locals are left behind.
When tourists come to Hawaiʻi, they might be greeted by the signs at baggage claim, ads on websites warning that “the ocean is different in Hawaiʻi” or videos playing on the TV in their hotel room warning them to go to lifeguarded beaches or “when in doubt, don’t go out.”
There’s been little to no expansive effort to educate the residents on ocean safety, according to former ocean safety directors, the Hawaiʻi Lifeguard Association and injury prevention experts at the Department of Health.
“Honestly, we never really had a real big push for residential information getting out there,” Kosaki said. “I think it’s sad.”
‘You Are Taking A Risk’
Ocean safety experts say there is finally momentum to address the number of residents who drown in Hawaiʻi’s waters. The Department of Health launched its first-ever keiki water safety campaign earlier this year focused on telling parents to assign a “water watcher” to keep constant eyes on kids in the ocean or pools. County-led Junior Lifeguard programs are expanding across the state to equip more young people with ocean safety knowledge.
There’s also an appetite to build more ocean safety messaging targeted specifically at locals. But how exactly to do that is a challenge. For years, most messaging has been simple slogans like “Talk to a lifeguard” or “When in doubt, don’t go out.”
That might not resonate with people who call Hawaiʻi’s islands home, Kirsten Hermstad, executive director of the Hawaiʻi Lifeguards Association, said.
“I’m not sure it’s one message. I think it’ll be messages tailored to each demographic,” she said. “What’s going to reach the ʻopihi picker is not going to reach the person right off the plane.”
Hermstad said that along with the Hawaiʻi Water Safety Coalition, a statewide advocacy group, the Hawaiʻi Lifeguard Association is working on building safety campaigns specifically geared to residents. The goal is to create culturally relevant campaigns that acknowledge the message for a surfer needs to be different than the message for a free diver or a fisherman.
It’s that kind of respect that is going to make the difference, said Duane DeSoto, a legendary waterman and surfer. DeSoto founded Nā Kama Kai, a nonprofit that teaches kids on Oʻahu’s westside about ocean safety and stewardship and helps young people cultivate their cultural connection to the ocean.
The first step is understanding the relationship people have with the ocean here, particularly Native Hawaiians.
“If you’re going to enter the ocean, you are making an agreement with Mother Nature that you are taking a risk,” DeSoto said.
Just instructing people not to go alone when free diving or out on the rocks in search of snails called ʻopihi is missing the point. It’s about creating a conversation, rather than just telling people what to do.
“If you want an ʻopihi picker to walk with a life vest, that’s crazy. But how about a CO2 inflatable that is the size of a cell phone?” he said. “The state can provide these things. Man, I mean, if we’re serious, we’d give them away.”
Change Falls To Community Members
In a state where it can take years to get lifeguards on beaches, Shirley De Rego is someone who gets things done quickly.
De Rego was on a camping trip with her family in 2005 when her 12-year-old son Alexander died after falling into the ocean while fishing at Kaʻawaloa Beach in South Kona. In the years since, she’s become a pillar of ocean safety in Hawaiʻi through the Alex and Duke De Rego foundation, also named for her son Duke, who died in a golf cart accident.
When two teenagers drowned off Shipman Beach about 15 miles south of Hilo in 2022, the private landowner called De Rego to ask if she could install a rescue tube at the secluded spot. Almost immediately, De Rego and her small crew of community members had installed a yellow flotation device hung up on a PVC pipe jammed in the rock.
The rescue tubes, which cost around $100, are designed to be thrown into the water to keep people afloat until help arrives. On Kauaʻi, where efforts to hang these on Hawaiʻi beaches got started, the Rescue Tube Foundation has hung 250 tubes around the island. The group estimates that they have been used to rescue at least 200 people.
Rescue tubes now dot the shore on all of the islands, including about 20 on Oʻahu and several dozen on Maui. But so far, this effort has been entirely spearheaded by locals, nonprofits and community groups.
For the first time on Oʻahu, the 2026 budget for the newly formed Department of Ocean Safety asked for $16,000 for rescue tubes.
After 15-year-old Noʻeau Lima drowned in a free diving accident on the westside of Oʻahu in 2020, a group of spearfishermen and free divers formed a nonprofit called Safe Free Dive Hawaiʻi. Through free training programs and safety courses, certified free diving instructors educate people on how to stay safe while participating in the subsistence fishing sport that has cost at least 58 residents their lives since 2015.
Earlier this year, the Hawaiʻi Water Safety Coalition released the state’s first Hawaiʻi Water Safety Plan. Spearheaded by bereaved families, ocean safety advocates and leaders from local foundations, the plan is intended to push the state to meet national recommendations, create a statewide water safety task force and build a master plan to decrease the number of drowning fatalities.
Hornor is one of the people who channeled her grief into the Hawaiʻi Water Safety Coalition. Now that she’s at the Department of Health, she has a slew of ideas to address gaps in drowning prevention. But it’s early in the process to see how much success she’ll have after so many years of state stagnation.
At Kohanaiki Beach on the Big Island, Rachel Able can’t help but think that it took her daughter’s life to get a lifeguard on a beach that is a favorite of local families.
It’s not clear exactly what caused her daughter’s surfing accident, and Able doesn’t want to speculate. But had there been a lifeguard stationed there, she believes, maybe things would have ended differently.
Lily had grown up surfing the breaks along the coast near Kona, sometimes sleeping in her bikini, always ready for the waves. “A true mermaid at heart,” as her mother says.
“I couldn’t keep her out of the water,” Able said. “She would have lived in the water if she could.”
On the day in June that county officials installed the lifeguard tower, Able stood looking at a gaggle of little blond girls – carbon copies of Lily herself – getting ready to go surfing.
Able longed for her daughter to be there to see the lifeguard watching over the girls running down to the waves with their boards. But she felt Lily’s presence.
“I wish it was in place when Lily was here,” Able said. “But she is a part of it.”
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.