Almost before the rest of Hawai'i knew a dam had burst on Kaua'i early Tuesday morning, Gina Kaulukukui had been dispatched to the scene by the Kaua'i Police Department. With a pager on her hip, and armed with abundant compassion, Kaulukukui heads the Kaua'i Hospice six-person "Beeper Team," a unique and specialized unit that steps into the center of human tragedies to help suffering families.

For the past week, Kaulukukui's group has spent every day until long past dark comforting family members in the small Wailapa Road community where three people died and four are still missing in the aftermath of the flash flood that burst Kaloko dam and swept through homes, across a major highway, and out to sea.

With volunteer team members backing up Kaulukukui and taking turns working with despairing family members, the group has been able to meet people at the airport, listen to their memories, hold their hands, cry with them and even share the difficult steps to the county morgue to identify a body.

"We're being invited in at the most intimate time of peoples' lives," said Kaulukukui, whose personal experience of growing up with loss after the early death of her father and then her grandmother was part of the inspiration for this unit. "Their whole life has changed and we're the companions as they shift and change and learn to live without these people.

"Hospice believes death ends a life, but not a relationship. And the relationship is very much alive through their memories. And that's a key component to their healing."

Meeting family members at the airport, sitting with them as they need a quiet place to begin fathoming the loss and then to help them make arrangements as necessary for funerals, is all part of what the Beeper Team does to support grieving families.

"We will fill in where the support is needed whether it's making travel arrangements for the family, hotel accommodations, or referring them to the appropriate social services they need," said Liana Soong, community liaison for Kaua'i Hospice. "

At 10 that first night, volunteer team member Sharron Edwards, a grandmother, was standing at Lihu'e Airport with another volunteer and a county worker holding a sign with the names of people they hadn't yet met. Kaulukukui had called for her help early that day and Edwards, in turn, had a colleague fill in for her at her job as manager of the Kapa'a Sands, a resort hotel.

"They landed and we were there," said Edwards of family members who touched down on Kaua'i without yet knowing about the tragic events.

"You kind of go into a different space and the words come. Sometimes later you think I should have said it this way. You just try to be very gentle and provide hope and at the same time you have to be honest."

The Beeper Team, which also includes a newspaper reporter, a businesswoman, a bookkeeper and the director of Hale Kipa on Kaua'i, has played a key role in keeping the families updated with the latest information from rescue workers.

But they've also stepped in to be a staunch support for rescue workers, too.

As the hours stretched by, it was Kaulukukui who realized the rescue workers were exhausted and hungry.

So she called her office and the mayor's office and the American Red Cross to mobilize food and water for the 40 or 50 fire, police, civil defense and county and state employees searching for survivors.

"So we called Big Save, the local grocer, and they're a huge supporter of Hospice, and we said, 'We're up at the scene, and the workers haven't eaten, is there anything you can do?' " Soong said.

"And they said, 'Sure, we'll pack up everything in our deli and send it up to you.' And they did."

Kaulukukui also called Starbucks, which sent jugs of coffee for the teams.

"By then systems were in place with the American Red Cross and the county and state to feed their own crews," Soong said. "But in the midst of a disaster that's the last thing they think about and one of the first things we think about."

The Beeper Team has been serving the island for more than a decade, created in the early 1990s primarily to respond to disasters that involved tourists.

"We noticed there was an increase in deaths among our visitors to the island and police were wondering how to take care of this widow who was now thousands of miles from home and here all alone," Soong said. "So out of this need," the team was created.

"The police and fire department are not trained to provide that type of emotional support to family members because their goal is to save the victim," Soong said, "and oftentimes the victim's family got left behind. So the Beeper Team came in to provide emotional support and take the family out of that crisis."

Team members are on call 128 hours a week, one week a month. They're unpaid volunteers, but undergo 60 hours of intensive training.

Even so, Kaulukukui said sometimes they, too, are heartbroken, and the words aren't easy.

"Sometimes there aren't any right words," she said. "But we try for a moment to slip on their shoes. ... Sometimes it's just saying, 'I'm so sorry, I can't imagine what this must be like.' So we're always doing this very gentle balancing act between providing them logistical and practical support as well as the emotional support they need. What they do know is that we care."

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com.