Hawaii County officials on Wednesday held a community meeting at Na‘alehu Elementary School Gym to update families with loved ones buried in Na‘alehu Cemetery, which was heavily damaged by flooding from Hurricane Lala earlier this month.

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Hawaii County officials on Wednesday held a community meeting at Na‘alehu Elementary School Gym to update families with loved ones buried in Na‘alehu Cemetery, which was heavily damaged by flooding from Hurricane Lala earlier this month.

Mayor Kimo Alameda facilitated the event, which was closed to the public and media.

According to the county, the meeting was to provide an update about burial recovery, review the timeline and community impacts, and give family members an opportunity to ask questions and receive answers.

Acting Civil Defense Administrator Darryl Oliveira, who was one of the presenters, said those involved in the recovery are now referring to the unearthed remains of decedents buried in the cemetery as “elements.”

“There’s everything from bone fragments to whole bodies that we’re finding,” Oliveira said. “I just want to be mindful of managing expectations, because if I say ‘remains’ — then all of a sudden, I think the layperson believes there’s full bodies all over the place.

“I spoke to one family member, and she said, ‘Hey, Darryl, can you just refer to them as loved ones?’ I said, ‘I’m happy to refer to them any way you want.’”

The county previously said 69 sets of full or partial remains were unearthed by the flooding. Oliveira said that number changed after he had a conversation Tuesday with Susan Steele D’Alonzo Jaques, senior archaeologist at ASM Affiliates in Kailua-Kona.

“When I spoke to her, she estimated they had inventoried or catalogued maybe a hundred elements, so far,” he said. “These range from maybe individual bone fragments to the whole body — of which we’ve recovered, I think, three, so far.”

Oliveira said recovery efforts consist of five phases.

— Preservation. “We’re trying to preserve, collect, store what we find for future connection to family. It’s also recovering any of the headstones or grave markers that may have been displaced,” he said.

— Identification. “This is where we start to work with families in different ways, depending on what we find,” Oliveira said. “As an example, with the casket that was found, from the data that was in it or on it, we were able to confirm the identity of the deceased. In that case, we were able to work with the family on an identification. In some of the other cases, it might be associating the element with a funerary item, say, an urn. It could be artifacts or part of a casket. It could be personal effects — maybe the deceased was interred with a family heirloom that ties them with the family.

“At some point, there will be DNA testing, but that will be done once we feel we’ve moved along further in the preservation phase, because we need to have the subject-matter experts and the technical support here to conduct that testing.

“With the current emergency declaration — the federal declaration — it provides us the opportunity to request and receive the technical support to assist with identification. And that’s already in motion.”

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— Reunification. “That’s where we’re able to associate what we’ve collected with a family to then provide them closure, in a sense that they may want to consider the next disposition” of the element, Oliveira said. He said options include taking the element home or to a different site for reburial.

— Cemetery access and burial security. “This is where we start to discuss the situation with the cemetery and whether that will be available for reinterment,” he said. “And we need to discuss how vulnerable the cemetery is, going forward, to future flooding.”

— Final disposition and disclosure. “It may mean we are looking at an alternate site for reinterment, as well as those elements that we are unable to identify or associate with a family, discussing with the community what are their thoughts and sentiments with a community memorial,” Oliveira said.

Oliveira said preservation presents the biggest challenge at the moment.

“That’s probably going to be the most intensive part of this operation, because it’s such a big area, the debris field is so large,” he explained. “The sediment can be deep in some areas. We’re working with a canine to help us locate what’s below the surface and, going through the debris, trying our best to identify what’s there and collect it before the debris is moved off site.”

Oliveira said records show more than 1,000 burial plots in the cemetery.

“In the area that was affected, I don’t have the exact number,” he said. “We also don’t have the exact number of burials that were disturbed, because a portion of the cemetery is still covered with rubble and debris. So, we don’t know if beneath that debris and rubble the graves have been disturbed.

“The other thing is, we don’t know how many plots may have had multiple burials, because sometimes families will bury more than one family member on a single plot, or inter other things, like an urn, with the casket. We’re still trying to sort that out.”

Asked for an estimate for the recovery effort, Oliveira said it’s “difficult to forecast how fast we can move.”

“We are asking for more resources and some areas take a little more time,” he said. “And just because we have these multiple phases, that doesn’t mean that some of this won’t happen simultaneously.”

Michelle Galimba, the County Council member representing Ka‘u, said her grandparents are buried in the Na‘alehu Cemetery, “but not the part that was damaged.”

“I have dear friends who were buried there, but they’re not family, so I don’t know what happened to their graves,” Galimba said. “But I’ll probably eventually find out.”

“I think people are still in shock, but we’re very grounded people here in Ka‘u,” she added. “So, I think, ‘OK, let’s get to work’ is pretty much what everyone is feeling.

“We aren’t very fancy, but we have very strong community bonds here. So, I think people are helping each other out in a very low-key, nonfancy way.”

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Email John Burnett at [email protected].