LIHU‘E — There was only so much Armando Peralta could do with the resources at hand Tuesday. During the long weekend, vandals hit a popular Eastside park with paint, damaging the Isenberg Tract. “They must have come in Friday night,”
LIHU‘E — There was only so much Armando Peralta could do with the resources at hand Tuesday.
During the long weekend, vandals hit a popular Eastside park with paint, damaging the Isenberg Tract.
“They must have come in Friday night,” Peralta said. “There is someone who comes on Saturday and they said the graffiti was already there when they came to check the park.”
A coach who uses the park for practice said when he arrived for practice, there was a broken pipe, beer bottles everywhere and the graffiti mess.
“We fixed the pipe and cleared the beer bottles and rubbish, but we couldn’t do anything about the graffiti,” the coach said. “This is not the first time they’ve hit the park.”
Peralta, a caretaker at Isenberg Park for 10 years, said he also takes care of Laukona Park in Hanama‘ulu and hasn’t had that kind of damage to the Hanama‘ulu facility.
“I used a cleaner to take care of the graffiti on the tile bathroom walls,” Peralta said. “It doesn’t come all off, but at least it could be cleaned off. The ones on the dugout walls need to be painted over.”
Isenberg Park is the home field for the Kaua‘i High School girls softball team, one of three Kaua‘i Interscholastic Federation teams. It is also the site of weeknight softball games by the Hawai‘i Government Employees Association league and one of the stops for the Kaua‘i Senior Softball League.
Previously, the park has been vandalized by graffiti and on one occasion the announcer’s booth, which has since been removed, was set on fire.
“I came home one night and I was surprised to see the fire engines,” said a resident who lives across the park. “There are kids in the park almost every night. And there’s always rubbish they leave behind, but the caretaker is good because he cleans it up without complaining.”
On previous incidents, community volunteers stepped up to help the county’s parks crews clean up the damage.
“Sometimes it’s the mothers of the softball girls who come to help paint and one day a fellow stopped by and replaced one of the bat racks that had been damaged,” Peralta said.
He shook his head sadly.
“How can people damage such a nice park?” he said.
