Weeks-long elevator outages leave Honolulu condo residents stranded
Weeks-long elevator outages leave Honolulu condo residents stranded
2026-09-10 · Hawaii · Compliance · Reported — unconfirmed
Elevator outages measured in weeks, not hours, hit more than ten Oahu residential buildings after the 2026 storm season — and the state agency that has to certify the repairs is running a backlog of 3,421 elevators. This is reporting, not an adjudicated finding, but the numbers come from named buildings and named officials.1
What was reported
As of September 3, 2026, outages across the named buildings ranged from two to more than six weeks, with no firm restoration dates. Buildings identified in the reporting include 1628 Kalākaua Avenue in McCully, 2215 Aloha Drive and Waikīkī Cove on Kūhiō Avenue in Waikīkī, the 25-storey Makiki Plaza on Pensacola Avenue, and Honuakaha on Queen Street, a seven-storey building housing primarily seniors.1
Concrete figures from that reporting: one Waikīkī repair quoted at $58,000; one Honuakaha elevator partly restored after three weeks; parts flown in from Tennessee. The state’s certification backlog stands at 3,421 of 8,924 elevators pending.
Earlier in the year, residents of Naniwa Gardens, a 14-storey condominium on Hawaii Kai Drive, lost power on Friday March 13, 2026 in a kona storm and went without elevator service or running water on upper floors until power was restored on the afternoon of Sunday, March 15.2
The legal frame: an elevator is a common element
Under HRS § 514B-137(a), “Except to the extent provided by the declaration or bylaws, the association is responsible for the operation of the property, and each unit owner is responsible for maintenance, repair, and replacement of the owner’s unit.” An elevator sits on the association’s side of that line in essentially every Hawaii declaration.
The three questions an outage raises for a board
1. What can the board spend without an owner vote? This is the question that decides whether repairs start in week one or week four. The answer is not in the statute alone — it is in the declaration and bylaws read against the association’s emergency-spending authority and its assessment procedure under HRS § 514B-148. A board that has to find out mid-outage has already lost the time that mattered.
2. Does the master policy cover water-driven damage to elevator control equipment? Storm elevator failures in Hawaii are frequently not mechanical — they are electrical, and specifically water reaching control boards in a machine room or a pit. Whether that is covered, and under which peril, is a policy-language question with a very large dollar answer, and it is answerable before the storm.
3. What happens when the outage runs long enough to exclude someone? Section 514B-137 is a maintenance duty. The Fair Housing Act is something else. Where a building’s only means of vertical access is out for weeks and the population includes elderly and disabled residents, the association is in reasonable-accommodation territory whether or not it caused the outage.
The accommodation problem, stated carefully
We are not saying an association is liable for a storm. We are saying that the accommodation duty attaches to how the association responds to the consequences — relocation assistance, delivery of essentials, prioritising a partial restoration for the floors with the greatest need — and that the reported instinct in these buildings ran the other way. Staff in the reporting described being warned off helping residents up and down stairs because of liability concern.
That is a real tension and it deserves a board decision made in advance, in writing, with counsel, rather than an on-the-spot judgment by a resident manager. An association that has no plan produces exactly the outcome reported here: nobody helps, because nobody is authorised to.
The knock-on nobody budgets for
The reporting notes buildings failing Section 8 inspections while the elevator is out. For a building with subsidised tenancies, an outage is therefore not only a habitability and accommodation problem but a revenue and compliance problem for individual owners, arriving at the association’s door as pressure to restore faster than the parts supply allows.
The backlog changes the planning arithmetic
An association cannot assume that finishing the repair ends the outage. With 3,421 of 8,924 elevators pending certification statewide, re-inspection is its own queue. A board budgeting a restoration timeline from the contractor’s estimate alone is budgeting the wrong number.
What to watch
Whether the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations addresses the certification backlog with additional inspector capacity, and whether the 2027 session takes it up. For boards, the actionable item is nearer: a written storm-response protocol for vertical-access failure, and a policy review of elevator equipment coverage, both of which are September work rather than next-outage work.
Related Hawaii HOA Topics
Stay on top of Hawaii HOA law
Every week: new Hawaii legislation, court rulings, and regulatory developments affecting condos, planned communities, and property managers. Free.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.