Ka Loko Dam: A family mourns and a community rallies

A landowner who lost friends and family argues that the disaster was avoidable

KILAUEA, Kauai » Bruce Fehring says his "family's dream was shattered" by half a billion gallons of floodwaters that rushed from a break in the Ka Loko Dam in the early morning hours of March 14.

Fehring pointed to a 20-foot-wide mud swath -- what is left of a ranch-style home where his daughter, son-in-law and grandchild had been. The roaring floodwaters also swept away four friends.

Fehring, a farmer and independent real estate broker, also had a nursery school on the property where his daughter, Aurora Fehring, taught. He had acres of trees and a palm nursery, as well as an organic garden.

All of that is gone.

"I haven't touched it," he said. "Nothing's been touched" since the breach.

At a news conference yesterday, Fehring made his first comments since the deaths of his daughter, Aurora; son-in-law, Alan Dingwall; grandson, Rowan Fehring-Dingwall; and friends Christina Macnees, her fiance Daniel Arroyo, Wayne Rotstein and Timothy Noonan.

'I have been thrust into a role I wouldn't wish upon anybody' -- Bruce Fehring

Fehring struggled to contain his emotions and asked for a moment of silence to pray for those lost.

He said he wants to make sure another dam breach does not happen.

While Fehring would not directly say who he believes is to blame for the tragedy, he twice mentioned the state's inability to check the dam despite a "legal mandate to do so."

He also referred to retired auto dealer James Pflueger, whom he did not name specifically, but called "a man who may have a great deal of responsibility for the Ka Loko Dam breach" as the owner of the dam.

The problem is not with the reservoirs themselves, he said. They support his fellow farmers.

"No, rebuild the Ka Loko and Morita Reservoir, but do so carefully and monitor, maintain and inspect them regularly," Fehring added.

He said that Allstate Insurance has denied his claims as well as his neighbors', saying what happened was "a quote-flood-unquote. This was no flood in no sense of the word."

His family is in counseling to help assuage their profound "sorrow and grief," he said. It is his wife, Cyndee, he said, who has been having the worst time of it. "But we are a strong and a tight family, and we will survive," Fehring said.

Fehring, who was staying on another property in Kilauea at the time of the flood, was not so sure all seven folks were sleeping when the water came through.

"Daniel (Arroyo) talked about how he liked to fish for prawns in the stream, and you do that with a flashlight at night," he said. "And Banyan (his caretaker, Wayne Rotstein's nickname), he was big on going out at night and getting the beetles off tall bushes. He was such a great horticulturist.

"Other than what's right in this area, I've walked down as far as I can to the gorge, and I have not seen any part of any building that was here and was taken away," Fehring said. "I can't find any pieces of it."

On the morning of March 14, about half a billion gallons of water flooded Wailapa Stream, leaving a full grass field intact but sending guardrails from Kuhio Highway a half-mile away.

"I have been thrust into a role I wouldn't wish upon anybody," said Fehring. "I'm dealing with it."

One of the hardest parts is that the tragedy could have been avoided, he said.

"What occurred was not an act of nature; it was a failure of man," he said. "What occurred in the early hours of March 14 was a dam breach, the failure of a dam conceived and built by man and which was legally mandated to be monitored, maintained and inspected by man.

"This is a personal disaster, quite obviously, for me," he said. "Ecologically and environmentally it is a huge disaster, and beyond that, it's an archaeologist's nightmare."

"In this valley, it was all old Hawaiian habitation terraces," he said. "In one fell swoop, thousands of years of evidence of human habitation were taken away."