Hawaii is bracing for a hurricane this weekend that could become the strongest storm to pass this close to the Big Island since the late 1950s, according to Weather.com. Forecasters expect Hurricane Nolo, now a Category 2 storm, to strengthen into a major hurricane as it approaches the island.
The storm isn’t expected to make landfall, and its strongest winds should stay offshore. The bigger concern is rain. “Life-threatening, catastrophic flooding and mudslides are possible,” especially in steep terrain on the Big Island and Maui, the National Hurricane Center said.
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Parts of the southeastern Big Island could see as much as 35 inches of rain, the state’s emergency management agency warned. That’s the same area Hurricane Lala flooded in August, and the ground there stayed so saturated that a smaller storm after it still caused flooding.
Nolo is Hawaii’s fourth tropical system this season, and it arrives while the state is still working through about $1 billion in recovery and resilience needs from earlier disasters, Gov. Josh Green said earlier this week. That puts more pressure on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, warned last month faces “similar or greater risk of disaster workforce capacity and competency limitations” than it did after hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.
Green said the state would tap its reserves if needed.
“We will take hundreds of millions of dollars from the Rainy Day funds, whatever we don’t have in support from the federal government and the dollars that we’ve already gotten, we’ll be able to cover these disasters,” Green said at a news conference Wednesday, KHON2 reported.
Testing the system
The GAO’s report found that more than half of FEMA’s senior executives have left, forcing less experienced staff into acting leadership roles. Overall, the agency has lost 17% of its staff through firings and deferred resignations since the start of 2025, the report found.
FEMA has not done any internal planning on its workforce needs, citing the need to wait for recommendations from President Donald Trump’s FEMA Review Council, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning law and policy institute. The center concluded that FEMA entered the 2026 hurricane season with major capability gaps.
Still, the full effect of the staff losses isn’t clear yet, said Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program and a co-author of its analysis.
“I think it’s too soon really to tell what that could mean for agency capacity,” Grawert said.
The problem emergency managers are seeing from FEMA is on the planning and grant side, with delays in getting money to states, said Todd DeVoe, first vice president of IAEM-USA, the U.S. arm of the International Association of Emergency Managers.
“It’s not necessarily on the response, and it’s not necessarily on the resident or the citizen being impacted,” DeVoe told Straight Arrow. “But it’s really about recovery dollars coming back to the community.”
Those gaps matter because states rely on federal aid for as much as 99.4% of disaster management costs, the Brennan Center found. Decisions on disaster declarations, which unlock that aid, have also slowed. Some states have waited as long as two months, up from about one month under previous administrations.
Signs of improvement
Hawaii’s most recent request for federal help moved quickly. When Green asked for an emergency declaration after Lala on Aug. 22, Trump approved it three days later, though the aid was limited to direct federal assistance.
“Mahalo to President Trump, Secretary Mullin and our federal partners for acting quickly on Hawaiʻi’s request,” Green said at the time.
Grawert said that’s how the system is supposed to work, with declarations “approved on a fairly quick basis” when needed.
“The question is: does one make a trend?” he said.
DeVoe said FEMA’s relationship with local governments has held up in his own experience.
“On the ground, the relationship between FEMA and our local governments are strong,” DeVoe said.
FEMA told E&E News in May that it was “fully prepared for hurricane season” and that the administration is “committed to ensuring Americans affected by hurricanes receive help as quickly and efficiently as possible.” The agency did not respond to Straight Arrow’s request for comment by publication.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also reversed some of his predecessor’s policies. A week after taking over, he repealed a rule from Kristi Noem that required her personal approval for FEMA payments over $100,000, a policy the Brennan Center said may have contributed to understaffed call centers after the 2025 Texas floods. Mullin also moved to rehire some fired FEMA employees, and the FEMA Review Council’s final report in May dropped earlier plans to cut about half of the agency’s staff.
After the storm passes
Green requested a federal emergency declaration Wednesday covering all four of Hawaii’s counties, seeking for the federal government to cover 75% of costs for debris removal, search and rescue, power restoration and communications. As of Friday afternoon, the request had not been approved. Nolo’s closest pass is expected Saturday.
That declaration would cover the immediate response. Money to rebuild would come later, and how quickly it arrives could matter as much as the storm response itself.
DeVoe said large states like California, Texas and Florida can absorb delays, saying it’s “painful for them, but it’s not devastating.” But for states with a smaller tax base, he said, “that could be the difference between recovery and not recovery.”
