An elderly couple lost their dream Hawaii home after it was destroyed by raging floods.
Tom and Carrie Bashaw, 80, were powerless to stop the devastation caused by the Kona storm, a winter cyclone that saw Maui pummelled with more than 20 inches of rain over five days last week.
The storm whipped up the Iao Stream into a river, which then eroded the foundations of their Happy Valley home, as reported by Hawaii News Now.
The couple was left blindsided as they didn’t think their home, located 75 feet away from the stream and 45 feet above it, was going to flood.
Compounding their woes, they didn’t have any flood insurance as their home wasn’t in a designated flood zone.
“Never expected my whole house to disappear,” Carrie told Hawaii News Now. “Everything’s gone.”
The flooding devastated their home — less than six years after it was built — and the couple’s living room and bedroom was swept away.
Tom said the floods had taken “the whole back half of the house.”
Tom and Carrie had been watching the forecast since Friday and started to plot their escape when they lost their mango and monkey pod.
They sought shelter in a barn that night before surveying the damage the following morning.
Tom heard a cracking sound while inspecting the state of his home — just before the garage collapsed.
“I held my phone up and videotaped it and it just went boom, right into the water,” he said.
Tom and Carrie are currently sleeping on air mattresses inside a storage container with their two cats, Civa and Ty.
“Losing so much so suddenly has been overwhelming and they are doing their best to get through this incredibly difficult time with support from their caring neighbors and community,” Carrie’s daughter, Stephanie Ichinose, said.
More than $60,000 has been raised for the couple in a GoFundMe created by Stephanie.
Maui saw the heaviest rainfall and in one location, 46 inches of rain fell between March 10 and 15, according to the National Weather Service.
