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Many learned a trade

When Koa Martin first started working for Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. in the late 1990s, he and his co-workers had their hands full toiling over machines in both the Puunene and Paia sugar mills. “I think I worked straight seven days a week, 12 hours a day, around the clock for ...

Losing a shipping scale

As sugar operations wind down this year, an elevated scale to weigh sugar and molasses will be closed, and that will prompt some Maui businesses to look elsewhere to weigh their containers before shipping them on barges. The scale at Kahului Trucking & Storage near the Kahului Harbor ...

One final push

In a great big basin of thick, goopy molasses, a set of wheels slowly rotates, sinking into the pool of shiny liquid and emerging with a viscous, dark brown coating that slides off and flaps in the wind before dripping back into the basin. In the Puunene Mill at Hawaiian Commercial & ...

Shipping sugar

KAHULUI — The sun-baked, wind-blown sugar cane that Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. burns, harvests and mills arrives here, where soft raw sugar crystals form more than several-story-high mountains of golden sweetness. Kahului Trucking & Storage Co. hauls about 150,000 tons of ...

‘End of an era’

PUUNENE — Sugar workers, retirees and company officials expressed sadness as well as pride as they witnessed “an end of an era” Monday with the delivery of the last load of sugar cane from the fields to the Puunene Mill. Fermin Domingo, a 40-year veteran of Hawaiian Commercial & ...

Going, going, gone

KAHULUI — Now, sugar really is gone. On Friday, the same day that Puunene Mill smokestacks stopped puffing, the last shipment of Maui-made sugar was carried out of Kahului Harbor. Bound for a refinery in California, the 685-foot-long Moku Pahu held 32,000 tons of sugar and 2,000 tons of ...