Hawai‘i Recovery Operations Plan (HI-ROP)
Purpose
The Hawai‘i Recovery Operations Plan (HI-ROP) describes the roles and responsibilities of entities within the State of Hawai‘i in preparation for and during recovery operations. Disaster recovery operations focus on ensuring that the State can affect the timely restoration, strengthening, and revitalization of infrastructure, housing, and a sustainable economy, as well as the health, social, cultural, historical, and environmental fabric of communities impacted by an incident.
The Hawai’i Office of Recovery and Resiliency (HI-ORR) is the State’s agency that coordinates recovery. HI-ORR develops and maintains the HI-ROP to provide guidance to the State for disaster recovery operations. Additionally, HI-ORR has other functions and mandates outside the scope of recovery that are not covered in this document, such as resilience, mitigation, and data science.
HI-ROP was published as of May 2025.
Scope
The HI-ROP is the recovery operations plan for the State. The HI-ROP outlines processes that are to be followed for all-hazards, state-level disaster recovery efforts. The identified actions and activities in the HI-ROP are based on existing state agency statutory authorities. The scope of this document covers 4 phases:
- Phase 1: Preparedness
- Phase 2: Incident Coordination
- Phase 3: Recovery Operations
- Phase 4: Project Tracking and After-Action Review
Phase 1: Enhance the State’s ability to conduct disaster recovery while building community resilience. Phase 1 focuses on developing relationships, capacity, and preparedness with RSFs, across counties, federal agencies, non-governmental, and private partners.
Pre-disaster preparedness efforts are continuous.
Phase 2: Assess recovery needs and operational requirements to achieve situational awareness of the damages and ongoing response activities immediately after an incident.
During Phase 2, response operations and Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) focus on stabilizing critical community lifelines, such as public safety, healthcare, transportation, telecommunications, electricity, food, water, and shelter.
Phase 3: Identify and secure resources and implement strategies to achieve the Governor’s and the counties’ recovery objectives. During this phase, the SDRC, RCG, and RSFs closely coordinate with impacted communities to identify priorities and needs for short and long-term recovery.
Phase 4: Align long-term recovery with day-to-day operations of state agencies. During Phase 4, the RSF structure will scale down as recovery operations are absorbed into day-to-day normal agency operations or specific recovery project management.
Recovery Support Function (RSF)
RSFs provide the coordinating structure at the state and federal levels for key areas of recovery assistance. They group state agencies together around a particular function of recovery assistance and designate a lead to coordinate among the supporting partners to deliver the assistance needed. Their purpose is to support county governments and State agencies by facilitating problem solving, improving access to resources, and fostering coordination among state and federal agencies, nongovernmental partners, and stakeholders. There are seven RSFs at the state-level and six at the federal level. The federal RSFs will align to the state structure when supporting the State of Hawai‘i.