Episode 37: Inside The Kona Low, Tom Greenwell Shares The Story
In this episode of Coffee With Tom, Tom Greenwell reflects on the historic Kona Low storm that swept through Kona in March and shares a firsthand perspective on the impact it had on Greenwell Farms.
[00:00:05] Matt Carter: Good morning, everyone. I’m Matt from Greenwell Farms, here with Tom Greenwell, our CEO. Morning, Tom.
[00:00:09] Tom Greenwell: Morning.
[00:00:10] Matt Carter: It is a beautiful morning. It’s a little bit cloudy, but, gorgeous out here today.
[00:00:14] Tom Greenwell: Oh, beautiful day.
[00:00:15] Matt Carter: So Tom, you know, everyone’s seen the story of the Kona Low on the national news and, all sorts of, you know, well-wishes have come to the farm, but I don’t think anyone’s heard the story directly from you. So just so everyone knows, right now it’s the end of April, and we’re going back a month to March 14th when a massive Kona Low came direct up the West Coast, and where were you, that afternoon on March 14th?
[00:00:45] Tom Greenwell: I was driving around the farm. Watching the, you know, the wind was just so, so intense. And I got worried about, you know, the leaves on the trees and the you know, problems to the trees, so I was driving around the farm all afternoon.
[00:01:01] Matt Carter: Right.
[00:01:03] Tom Greenwell: And you know, it was just wind. We had rain.
[00:01:06] Matt Carter: Sure.
[00:01:08] Tom Greenwell: I wasn’t really worried about that. It wasn’t intense at that time. But, as the sun set and, we ate dinner, a little bit later, my son Ben, you know, brought it to my attention that, that little, kind of a, it’s a river when it- when, you know, we get intense rains. Was flowing, so-
[00:01:34] Matt Carter: That’s kind of a drainage ditch, right, at the time?
[00:01:36] Tom Greenwell: Yeah.
[00:01:36] Matt Carter: Yeah.
[00:01:36] Tom Greenwell: It’s, it’s a normal, you know, when we get big rains or it comes down.
[00:01:41] Matt Carter: Sure.
[00:01:42] Tom Greenwell: Been doing that since 2004. and so I went out, went, “Whoa, yeah, this is pretty heavy.” So Ben and I went down, got the tractor. We drove the bulldozer up just to kinda block our driveway so in case it did get, you know, a lot heavier. By the time we were driving through this farm here the water was already six inches deep through this whole field.
[00:02:10] Matt Carter: Wow. Wow.
[00:02:11] Tom Greenwell: Down below us and all the way across. And, by the time we got up to the house, it was, you know, a good eight inches of water flowing down.
[00:02:22] Matt Carter: Wow.
[00:02:22] Tom Greenwell: And, kinda looked at Ben and said, “You know, I think just park the tractor. I’m gonna, I’m gonna get, Mom out of the house, and let’s get the cars moved to safety.” So I got, I got her out of the house. I got the two dogs finally out of the, off the porch and, jumped in the truck. We drove around. We took Ben’s truck up to the safety up by the wet mill, came back.
[00:02:54] Matt Carter: Mm.
[00:02:54] Tom Greenwell: And our other two vehicles were gone.
[00:02:56] Matt Carter: God.
[00:02:57] Tom Greenwell: I mean, actually literally that much, Really washed into the, Yeah, I mean, it just pushed them down the hill.
[00:03:03] Matt Carter: Wow. That’s unbelievable. And when a flash flood comes down the mountain like that, I mean, it’s moving 100 to 300 pound boulders, right?
[00:03:11] Tom Greenwell: Oh, yeah.
[00:03:12] Matt Carter: And you can. What does it sound like?
[00:03:14] Tom Greenwell: Well, it’s a big roar.
[00:03:15] Matt Carter: It’s a big roar.
[00:03:15] Tom Greenwell: It’s, you know, it’s, it’s kinda, you know, we’re not used to freight trains around here.
[00:03:21] Matt Carter: Right .
[00:03:21] Tom Greenwell: But, you know.
[00:03:22] Matt Carter: Sounds like it, yeah.
[00:03:23] Tom Greenwell: It’s just that roar, and it’s a constant roar.
[00:03:26] Matt Carter: Mm.
[00:03:27] Tom Greenwell: You know, honestly, just doing things fast as we can and, you know, make sure we’re safe.
[00:03:34] Matt Carter: Sure.
[00:03:35] Tom Greenwell: You know, we just backed out of there at that moment.
[00:03:37] Matt Carter: Right. So the good news is nobody was hurt, right?
[00:03:41] Tom Greenwell: Nobody was hurt.
[00:03:42] Matt Carter: Yeah.
[00:03:42] Tom Greenwell: And, you know, the land will re-heal. That I guarantee. It always does.
[00:03:49] Matt Carter: Right.
[00:03:50] Tom Greenwell: And.
[00:03:50] Matt Carter: So the newspaper says you’re facing almost ten million in damage. That’s the roads, the nursery, the, part of the wet mill, your house, part of the farm, the vehicles. And I’m, I’m not directly involved with this. I’m just kinda looking at it from the side. But navigating insurance and FEMA and all the programs, it, it’s insane, right?
[00:04:11] Tom Greenwell: No, it totally is insane.
[00:04:12] Matt Carter: Yeah.
[00:04:13] Tom Greenwell: It’s, I mean, as you go through and there’s, you know, so this farm is part of the old ranch that’s below us. I mean, there’s ditches are 50 feet deep.
[00:04:25] Matt Carter: Wow.
[00:04:25] Tom Greenwell: I mean, literally. And that’s not an exaggeration.
[00:04:28] Matt Carter: Wow, 50 feet deep.
[00:04:29] Tom Greenwell: Yeah. All that rock that was on the bypass road, you know, that all came from, came from a couple just, I mean, just big old crevices carved out of the side of the hill.
[00:04:45] Matt Carter: I see.
[00:04:46] Tom Greenwell: It’s a pretty steep hill. You know, we’re two miles from the highway. We’re 1,500 feet, so that’s a lot of drop.
[00:04:52] Matt Carter: Sure. Sure.
[00:04:54] Tom Greenwell: And, yeah, it’s, it’s the worst flood I’ve ever seen. And I hope I never see another one like that.
[00:05:04] Matt Carter: Knock on wood.
[00:05:05] Tom Greenwell: Yeah.
[00:05:06] Matt Carter: So Tom, as we look towards the next year, I guess you’re not gonna be playing a lot of golf but.
[00:05:13] Tom Greenwell: That’s over.
[00:05:14] Matt Carter: Is there a kind of a plan in place to start getting back to normal and, you know, recovering? Are we waiting on funding from FEMA?
[00:05:23] Tom Greenwell: No.
[00:05:23] Matt Carter: Are we waiting on anything else? Are we just.
[00:05:25] Tom Greenwell: So, you know, from day one that first Sunday it was kinda walking around and like, “Oh, my goodness.”
[00:05:31] Matt Carter: Sure. Sure.
[00:05:32] Tom Greenwell: But Monday, you know, the, the whole farm came together. Everybody that works here came together. The, you know, thank God the roasting room wasn’t hurt.
[00:05:43] Matt Carter: Great.
[00:05:44] Tom Greenwell: Lucky for people that love our coffee, the mail order room wasn’t hurt.
[00:05:49] Matt Carter: Great.
[00:05:49] Tom Greenwell: So those, those departments ran as normal, and we were able to get coffee out, you know, and roasted.
[00:05:56] Matt Carter: Great.
[00:05:57] Tom Greenwell: Thankfully, our inventory was basically intact. So it hasn’t, you know, it’s not gonna hurt us going forward.
[00:06:05] Matt Carter: Gotcha.
[00:06:07] Tom Greenwell: But it was just the damage. You know, the retail area, right?
[00:06:11] Matt Carter: Yeah.
[00:06:11] Tom Greenwell: That was, that was like a rock garden when we were done. We had this new big ditch.
[00:06:18] Matt Carter: Yeah.
[00:06:19] Tom Greenwell: Took out our roads.
[00:06:20] Matt Carter: Right.
[00:06:20] Tom Greenwell: Took out my mom’s bridge. You know? But everybody just jumped in and, you know, we got it cleaned up really fast up there. The state did a great job getting the road back together for us.
[00:06:35] Matt Carter: Right.
[00:06:37] Tom Greenwell: And you know, we got traffic moving normally. It’s gonna take a lot of time in the rest of the farm because, you know, we’re trying to get back to farming. We’ve gotta get tractors back in. As we can see, you know, the trees, you know, they’re acting like nothing ever happened.
[00:06:57] Matt Carter: Right.
[00:06:57] Tom Greenwell: There. But if we look out there in the field, you know, you see a lot of damage still. We’re slowly cleaning that up, filling in ditches, filling in, you know, so we can start mowing the grass again and.
[00:07:13] Matt Carter: Sure.
[00:07:14] Tom Greenwell: Taking care of the beetle. We have, a lot of equipment here from friends that have donated time, donated equipment. We’ve, great, you know, I, I can’t say enough about the outpouring of help that people have offered us. And I really wanna thank everybody for that ’cause, you know.
[00:07:44] Matt Carter: For sure.
[00:07:44] Tom Greenwell: It, it’s everything. There’s the people on social media. It’s, you know, phone calls, companies that we deal with donating, you know, supplies to us so we can get the nursery going. We lost, you know, twenty-seven, twenty four thousand trees probably. We recovered about three thousand trees was all out of that. So replanting, you know, pr- won’t happen this year, but hopefully in a year we’ll start replanting missing trees, damaged trees, and hopefully get trees to, our farmers that s- support us.
[00:08:27] Matt Carter: Right.
[00:08:29] Tom Greenwell: Again. You know? S- we used to help them out a lot.
[00:08:33] Matt Carter: Sure.
[00:08:35] Tom Greenwell: And but, you know, we’re not the only people that got hurt in this flood.
[00:08:41] Matt Carter: Sure. I understand. I understand.
[00:08:42] Tom Greenwell: And, we’re just. And so, but like we said, nobody got hurt. That’s the main thing.
[00:08:50] Matt Carter: Well, Tom, there’s not a lot I can add to that. I just wanna thank you for sharing a very personal story. And as we recover, we’re gonna keep everybody in the loop and keep you informed. And, we, like he said, appreciate all the warm and well wishes. So see you again next month.
[00:09:07] Tom Greenwell: All right.
[00:09:08] Matt Carter: Thank you guys so much. Aloha.
[00:09:09] Tom Greenwell: Aloha.
