@jacy

my heart goes out to the people of waialua, the town being hit hardest by this unrelenting storm. it’s the one you see in the opening shot of this vid 🥺 waialua is a small farming & plantation community on Oahu’s north shore. it’s a super local, tight-knit community and it’s where my best friend grew up. her family and several of our other friends still live there and were evacuated yesterday amidst severe thunderstorms & flooding. they have been unable to return because the only accessible road that isn’t flooded is now exposed to a massive gas leak. they don’t know if their houses are still standing, their neighbors made it out, or what awaits their return. and even more rain is expected later today 😔 the bigger looming issue though - and they reason they were evacuated - is the wahiawa dam. it’s a plantation-era relic built by Dole when they opened their world-famous pineapple operation in Hawaii. Dole is the largest landowner and the largest employer in waialua and they’ve been warned for DECADES that the dam is unsafe and the spillway is insufficient to hold back water in the event of a massive enough storm. but rather than do the prudent, community-minded thing, Dole turned a blind eye and now ~2,500 residents downstream are at major risk. and while it hopefully doesn’t happen today, the dam will burst. so fuck dole. fuck monsanto. and fuck every other big business who doesn’t do right by the communities they extract from. WE > ME WE is def > than PROFITS and more ppl & businesses need to start acting like it.

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