What the agencies are posting

County of Maui roads

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What we check, and how often

Four sources, twice an hour. DLNR's park notices page for closures. The National Weather Service for active alerts covering Maui. The state Department of Health for water-quality advisories, including the island-wide brown water advisories that follow heavy rain. And County of Maui road notices, because the approach to Mākena is a single road.

Each reading is timestamped, and if a source doesn't answer we say so rather than showing you the last thing it said. When our reading is old or a source is down, the safe assumption is that we don't know, and the link to the agency is right there.

DLNR does not publish a feed

Worth being straight about the weakest link. DLNR's closure information lives in hand-edited HTML on its park notices page. There's no working RSS feed and the site's API is closed, so reading it means parsing a page a person maintains by hand.

That's why we show you the matched text from DLNR verbatim with a timestamp, rather than converting it into a green or red badge of our own. If DLNR has written something about Mākena, you should read what they wrote.

An open park is not a safe ocean

No notice from any of these agencies tells you whether the water is safe on the afternoon you arrive. A closure feed doesn't see a rip current, a shore-break set, or how the sand is shaped this week.

Big Beach's shore break in particular is not a condition that gets posted, because it's a permanent property of the beach. Lifeguards, posted signs and the water in front of you outrank anything on this page.

Questions people ask

Is Mākena State Park open today?

The status panel on this page shows the most recent reading of DLNR's park notices, with the time we took it. DLNR's own notices page is the source of record if the two disagree.

How often is this page updated?

We read all four sources twice an hour. Each reading is timestamped, and a stale or failed reading is labelled rather than hidden.

Does no closure mean it's safe to swim?

No. It means no agency has posted a closure that we could read. Ocean safety depends on the conditions in front of you, and Big Beach's shore break is a permanent hazard that never appears as a notice.

Where do I find surf and tide information?

On the surf report page, which carries the National Weather Service south-facing surf forecast, the PacIOOS wave model and tide predictions for the Makena tide station.

Sources for this page

This site is independent of Hawaiʻi DLNR, the County of Maui and emergency services.