Holy cow! The October quake that hit the Big Island took its first hotel casualty as the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, due to extensive structural damage to its roof, was shuttered indefinitely This information came to light yesterday after a private engineering consultancy retained by the hotel submitted a final assessment of quake damage. The hotel's GM said the hotel would reopen after repairs were completed but didn't give a date. He did say the repairs required would have been major. This is quite sad on a number of levels.

First, the Mauna Kea is one of only a handful of architecturally distinct hotels in Hawaii. Built by Laurance Rockefeller in 1965, it was the first luxury hotel on the Big Island and has long since ranked among the best hotels in the world. The gracious structure is both soft and angular, with burbling koi ponds running through the air atriums and a spacious, gracious green lawns filled with Adirondack chairs overlooking the stellar Kaunaoa Beach, a gorgeous white crescent. I've walked through the hotel several times and stayed there once. It truly was a special place with legions of repeat visitors.

Here's what's particularly spooky. When I spoke to visitor industry officials on the Big Island immediately after the quake, they told me that county inspectors had already given the property a clean bill of health and that the hotel was contracting the private engineers to look it over. Most hotels on the Big Island did not take this second step, to my knowledge. So could there be other hotels on the Big Island that are seriously damaged but got clean bills of health? I also may be incorrect in my understanding that the county had told the hotel it saw no serious damage. I hope I am.

But if they did, the next question to ask -- particularly with ongoing seismic activity on the Big Island -- is: what other big hotels need a more extensive inspection? Less critical but of some concern is how well the Big Island's dozens of B&Bs survived and which ones have performed sufficient repairs. The Big Island is well known for its high volume of black market construction activity and frontier attitudes on permitting. The answers to these questions I'd surely like to know and probably visitors would, too, as its probably close to inevitable that Hawaii will be hit with another serious quake within the next two decades.

Mauna Kea Beach Hotel/808/882-7222

—Alex, 12/02/06