Several units at Hy-Pac Self-Storage in Honolulu were flooded during Tropical Storm Darby, which pounded the island with rain on July 24 and 25. Now, several tenants of the property at 2150 N. Nimitz Highway are angry because they weren’t notified about the damage in a timely manner and little is being done to help them recover their valuables, according to the source.
"Monday, we didn't get any call. Tuesday, my sister just came in and she texted me that everything is muddy, and I've heard other people [say] they got called maybe Tuesday or Wednesday," said Greg Socito, who claims most of his items aren’t salvageable. "We can't even stay in our storage, even just to take stuff out. It smells really bad.”
Another tenant, who had a unit at the facility for 10 years, lost about $31,000 in business materials, according to his daughter, Stacey Kaneshiro. “Nobody got notified. My dad and I just had an instinct to just go over there and look at the assessment,” she says. "It was very muddy and disgusting and smelly—it was very bad."
Hy-Pac has cleaned up the road into the property, Socito said, but it wasn’t completed for nearly a week. The operator also provided pallets for customers to use, the source reported. "It's kind of frustrating because they're not giving us any help. They're just watching over us," said Kaneshiro. Hy-Pac said it planned to overlock damaged units and hire cleaners, but hasn’t said when this will happen, she added.
The facility owner declined to comment, the source reported.
Darby was named a Category 3 hurricane in the Eastern Pacific, which then moved through the Hawaiian Islands as a tropical storm. Parts of Oahu, Hawaii, received more than 7 inches of rain in three hours, according to news reports. Darby is the fifth known tropical cyclone to landfall in Hawaii since 1958.
Hy-Pac provides free use of its moving truck and a driver to new customers upon move-in. Open daily, the facility offers traditional storage units as well as ocean freight containers.
