A 93-year-old retired kindergarten teacher was found dead after Hurricane Lala tore through Hawaii's Big Island over the weekend, leaving thousands without power and another deadly storm already forming offshore.
May Doi spent decades teaching children at Naalehu Elementary, a small school at the southern tip of the Big Island. Police found her dead on Monday after she was reported missing. Neighbors believe she was trying to escape floodwaters and reach a nearby shelter when the storm overtook her. She was one of at least two people killed by Hurricane Lala, which the National Hurricane Center classified as the first major hurricane of 2026 in the Central Pacific Ocean.
The second victim, a man in his 60s whose identity has not been released, was found by residents in a pasture on Tuesday. Police had been asked to conduct a welfare check on him the day before. Together, the two deaths underscore what residents of a small, rural community already know: when a major storm hits a remote stretch of Hawaii, help is far away and the most vulnerable pay the highest price.
Naalehu is home to roughly 800 people, a former sugar plantation town where everyone knows everyone. May Doi was, by all accounts, woven into the fabric of the place. Her husband, now deceased, taught math. She taught kindergarten. And she kept teaching long enough to see the grandchildren of her earliest students walk through her classroom door.
ʻĀina Akamu, a vice principal at a local school and a former student of Doi's, described what she meant to the town. As the Associated Press reported, Akamu's own father had Doi as a teacher.
"Mrs. Doi was my dad's kindergarten teacher. She taught grandkids of her students. She was a fixture in this community."
Akamu added simply: "She was so strong."
At 93, Doi was still living in the community she had served for most of her life. When the storm hit, she apparently tried to get herself to safety. She didn't make it. That a woman who gave so much to a small town died alone in a flood, at that age, is the kind of loss that statistics cannot capture.
Hurricane Lala delivered staggering rainfall to the Big Island. The National Weather Service recorded 43.54 inches, more than three and a half feet, in Laupahoehoe on the northeast coast, the heaviest total measured from the storm. Heavy rain and powerful winds tore roofs off structures, uprooted trees, and sent mud and rock cascading across roads.
Dozens of homes were washed from their foundations. Bridges sustained damage. A section of a two-lane road collapsed, cutting off the community of Pahala entirely. Road crews were working to clear debris along Highway 11 outside Pahala, but the scale of the damage dwarfed the available manpower.
Hawaiian Electric reported that roughly 17,000 customers on the Big Island remained without power as of Wednesday. Some customers on Oahu and Maui also lost service. The utility warned that repairs in the hardest-hit areas, including the Big Island's southern end, could take at least two weeks.
Two weeks without electricity in a remote community with collapsed roads and limited supply lines is not a minor inconvenience. It is a survival problem.
Beyond the structural damage and the deaths, Lala inflicted a wound that is harder to quantify. The storm destroyed two cemeteries in the area, scattering remains and caskets across the landscape. Akamu's own ancestors have been buried in one of those cemeteries since 1850, more than 175 years of family history, now strewn through mud and debris.
Akamu described the scene in terms that convey the depth of the loss. She recounted community members pleading with road crews not to clear certain areas, fearing their relatives' remains might be buried in the rubble.
"Don't clear the road, my grandma could be in there."
She continued:
"Our graveyard is now scattered all over the community and how do we heal from that? That's what makes me most emotional, it's like you lost them again."
For a community rooted in generational ties to the land and to ancestors, the destruction of burial grounds is not collateral damage. It is a second loss layered on top of the first. Akamu put it in the plainest terms she could: "We just ask the ancestors to protect us."
U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation approved an initial $6 million in emergency relief to help repair transportation infrastructure damaged by Lala. Whether that figure will prove adequate given the scope of road and bridge damage remains an open question. A collapsed highway section, damaged bridges, and debris-choked routes across the southern Big Island will demand sustained federal attention, not just a first installment.
And the calendar is not cooperating. Even as residents dug out from Lala, the National Hurricane Center warned that conditions were ripe for a new tropical depression forming far to the east-southeast of the islands. The center advised that the system could strengthen into a hurricane by the weekend and move near or over the Hawaiian Islands.
The hurricane center urged that "interests in the Hawaiian Islands should closely monitor the progress of this system."
Meanwhile, Lala itself remained a Category 3 storm as of Wednesday, carrying top sustained winds of 115 miles per hour and moving northwest at 10 miles per hour. Forecasters expected it to turn north early Thursday. Hurricane warnings were posted for portions of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, stretching from Lisianski Island to Maro Reef. The storm was forecast to veer east of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, home to a few dozen U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff, volunteers, and contractors, one of the most remote inhabited outposts on Earth.
With roads cut off and power down, Naalehu's residents were left to organize much of their own recovery. Akamu said she was working to set up a hub for donated items. The community's most urgent needs were generators, gasoline, and propane, the basics of survival when the grid is gone and the roads are impassable.
That a local vice principal is coordinating supply distribution for an 800-person town says something about the scale of institutional response so far. Rural communities in Hawaii sit at the end of very long supply chains under normal conditions. After a major hurricane, those chains snap. The people left behind do what Americans in small towns have always done: they help each other and hope the cavalry arrives before the next storm.
No amount of federal paperwork will bring May Doi back, or reassemble the scattered graves of families who have called that stretch of Hawaii home since before statehood. What those 800 people in Naalehu need now is not a press release, it is power, fuel, and clear roads before the next hurricane makes landfall.
