Good Company

A volunteer fire brigade enhances the safety—and the aloha spirit—of the Hualālai community.

BY LORI BRYAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANNA PACHECO

This New Year’s Eve, Hualālai’s intimate enclave of homeowners and hotel guests will see a series of spell binding fireworks—a wondrous show, held at midnight high above the white-sand beach at the Four Seasons Resort Hualālai’s Palm Grove, that would not be possible without the habitual hard work and selfless commitment of an all-volunteer crew. “The only way we can have the fireworks,” says Hualālai’s director of secu rity, Amy Regidor, “is by virtue of the fire brigade.” If anyone understands the true significance of the Hualālai Fire Brigade—a dozen and a half Hualālai employees, each of whom volunteers his or her own time as part of the firefighting team— it’s Regidor. A 35-year veteran of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, she has overseen all iterations of the group since 1997, when it was a volunteer company under the Hawai‘i Fire Department. Today, it is an official fire brigade—independently operated, equipped with its own fire truck, dedicated to Hualālai—and as focused as ever on the resort community’s safety.

Members of the Hualālai Fire Brigade include Curtis Black, Robby Henriques

Ken Stover, Carl Stewart, brigade chief Ralph Yawata, Earl Regidor, and John Palos.

Under the expert direction of Ralph Yawata (shown at near above right), a retired assistant chief of the Hawai‘i Fire Department, the Hualālai Fire Brigade’s volunteer crew members receive hands-on fire-response training monthly at the resort. Some of the crew are also emergency medical responders, and their in-house training includes an initial six-day program followed by recertification every two years.

“We’re anywhere from 25 to 40 minutes for EMS [emergency medical services] and fire, and police response could take up to an hour depending on what their volume is,” says Regidor, noting the remoteness of Hualālai’s 865 coastline acres. “So we understood that we would have to provide first response to situations and manage them until the police or fire came in.” Consequently, her security officers are trained as emergency medical responders, or EMRs, and the EMRs, along with the rest of the volunteer crew, receive training specific to fire response.

“I have always sought out employees for my department that have backgrounds within fire,” says Regidor. “Since we began, I would hire active firefighters within the county to work on a casual basis here [at the resort]; so they would work anywhere from two to three shifts a week, and they came with all the skill sets.”

Ralph Yawata, the current chief of the Hualālai brigade, is a prime example of Regidor’s approach. A retired assistant chief of the Hawai‘i Fire Department (he oversaw all of the medical paramedics for the county) and current teacher of a fire-science class at Hawai‘i Community College Pālamanui, Yawata works in Hualālai’s security department four days a week and helms the volunteers’ training. The in-house EMR training is six days initially, with recertification required every two years, and fire-response training is held monthly at the resort. “I’m a firm believer in hands-on training,” says Yawata. “I don’t believe in a reading-somethingand-signing-off kind of a thing.”

Under his guidance, the volunteers practice everything from driving the fire truck and operating the pump to attacking a live fire, the latter of which the crew will undertake this season at an airport fire station equipped for just such a drill. “They actually have a pit and a makeshift fuselage made out of galvanized material—it’s a hollow thing—and they shoot up contaminated jet fuel that they cannot use, and they light it so you get this black smoke and you get the heat,” explains Yawata. “I just want the guys to feel the heat.”

Such experiences are designed to engender readiness. “I tell them, ‘I’m not going to be there when you get the call, so you’ve got to make the decision about what you’re going to do,’” he says. He challenges the volunteers to think on their feet, and he tries to help them be safe. “When there’s a fire, I tell you, it just changes things inside of you, your mental state. It can cause your heart rate and your blood pressure and your breathing to go up. Some people may not think properly. You can only simulate so much.”

Fortunately, the volunteers do think seriously about their duties because of the expert training provided by Yawata and his colleague, Gil Tavares. Tavares—who retired in 1997 as the battalion chief of training and operations for the Hawai‘i Fire Department’s West Hawai‘i division—came to Hualālai in 1999, joining Regidor’s security team and the brigade. He served as brigade chief until he retired from his security post in 2017, and now he helps Yawata. “I come in once a month

to assist Ralph with training,” says Tavares. “Ladder training, fire hose training, fire stream training—we train them in all aspects of firefighting,” he says. However, the volunteers are not trained to enter a building and fight an internal fire, he explains, because that requires specialized training and gear, including self-contained breathing apparatuses that the crew do not have. Tavares was instrumental in bringing the brigade’s current fire truck to Hualālai, as well as a prior truck that the county reclaimed before the resort formed its own brigade. The present-day truck came from Dallas and “was a perfect fit for our needs,” Tavares says, pointing out that the Hualālai community helped raised funds to acquire it. “We had meetings with the community, and they believed that buying a fire truck was the right thing to do, and to continue to have our people trained.”

The community continues to fund the truck’s equipment-related needs, ensuring that the brigade is supplied with a fully operational vehicle replete with pump and 750-gallon tank. Also part of the crew’s firefighting arsenal is a Polaris all-terrain vehicle (ATV), which hooks up to a hydrant and can adroitly maneuver on narrow pathways or in tight spaces where the truck simply can’t go.

Brigade members are on standby 24-7 to aid the Hualālai community in an emergency.

Volunteers are available to respond to an emergency 24-7. “There are three separate shifts in a 24-hour period,” says Tavares. “We try to recruit for each shift to ensure that, regardless of when we have a fire call or an emergency, at least one person on that shift knows how to operate the fire truck.” Though alarms going off is fairly routine, he says, the cause is usually minor. “Most of the [hotel’s] fire alarms are caused either by steam showers or people making toast or popcorn in their rooms.” Outdoors, he notes, the risk of a brush fire is fairly small because the grounds have so much greenery and so little dry grass, and in the residential area, incidents have been few. “The fires we’ve had—and we’ve only had a couple of them, fortunately, because of the early warning systems—when our units arrived at the scene, the fires were small, and we were able to extinguish them quite rapidly.”

Brigade members are on standby 24-7 to aid the Hualālai community in an emergency.

Security officer and brigade volunteer Robby Henriques remembers personally being on duty when a nearby traffic collision called for quick action. “There was a car accident up on the highway that involved a semitruck and a couple of passenger cars, and it was pretty bad,” says the Kona-born Henriques, who has worked for more than 10 years at the resort and whose firefighting expertise includes some training he had during his 20 years in the U.S. Navy. He and another brigade member, an engineer, answered the radio call and responded to the scene with the truck. “We were caring for the people until the fire department showed up.”

For landscape manager John Palos, who oversees the Four Seasons property’s roughly 35-acre footprint, it was a recent training simulation calling for fire response at King’s Pond that still resonates. “Now, the fire truck can’t get to the scene,” recounts Palos, “so we get the fire truck, attach to the fire hydrant, the fire hydrant supplies the water to the truck, the fire truck pushes the water, and we have a Polaris ATV that has all the hoses. The Polaris ATV team is laying the pipe as it gets to the scene and doing all the hookups, and the engine team is setting up the hookup to the engine supply and feeding the water to the guy on the end.”

Suffice it to say, the brigade members must be capable of handling multiple tasks at once under potentially high-pressure circumstances. “There’s a lot of material that you need to know,” says Palos, who’s been a Hualālai employee since 2010 and is also a professional musician. “It could cost people’s property or lives if you don’t do it right.” Doing it right will indeed be the volunteer firefighters’ focus this New Year’s Eve, when the hotel puts up its fireworks over Palm Grove for Hualālai’s residents and guests to enjoy. “We have the fire inspector come down, and we set up our hoses to make sure we can respond,” says Palos. “During the event, we’re in full suit—our full gear—and we [ensure] guests watch safely. They’re curious and want to come in close.” He remembers a single firework going sideways instead of up at a past celebration; luckily, it went toward the pond. “We stand by,” he says. “That’s why we’re in full gear—just in case.”

Crewʻs Control

The women and men of the Hualālai Fire Brigade are employees of Hualālai Resort, but their roles as brigade overseers and crew members are voluntary. Here, several share their thoughts on what it means to have good command of fire safety and to help protect and serve the Hualālai community.

AMY REGIDOR

“The volunteers know this isn’t playtime. They come back [from training] and they’re sweaty, they’re hot, they’re sore. It gives them a sense of pride, everybody on the brigade. And they’re recognized: We do an annual mahalo breakfast, and all of our senior managers come to acknowledge them and their commitment—that they don’t have to do this, but they do it.”

JOHN PALOS

“It’s a brotherhood. It’s guys from various departments— engineering, security, myself in landscape—it’s good training, it’s hard work. You feel responsible. And we have a good leader: Ralph Yawata is a retired assistant chief, and so he teaches us well. He has a lot of patience. Some of our volunteers have moved on with the training they got here—they’re now firemen.”

RALPH YAWATA

“It challenges me because we only train once a month: What can I cover in that twohour period that will challenge them, not be boring, but also keep them safe and fulfill what we need to do to maintain the brigade? I think they respect what I teach them, and it’s not a guy or boys thing. Everybody’s an individual. I know most of them, what makes them tick—I try to figure that out.”

GIL TAVARES

“The people in a volunteer fire department normally live in the community they volunteer to protect—that’s not so here. None of our fire brigade personnel live on this property. They volunteer to help protect the community they work for, and I think that’s very commendable. The fact that they’re volunteering makes you feel really good about helping them with their training.”