Meals on Wheels programs are short on volunteers to deliver meals to O'ahu's home-bound seniors, with military deployments and plentiful jobs as two reasons for the shortage.

While the shortage is not as dire as on the Mainland, organizers say some areas of the island sorely need volunteers.

Lanakila Meals on Wheels, which delivers about 1,700 meals a day, has suffered a 20 percent drop in the number of hours volunteered, said Marian Tsuji, president of Lanakila Rehabilitation Center, which runs the program.

Deployments and the state's tight labor market have whittled away the number of potential volunteers and the high cost of gas has scared others away, Tsuji said.

"What ends up happening is you have to deploy your paid staff to do your delivering and that takes away from the number of meals you can deliver," she said.

With more volunteers, she could spend more money on meals, Tsuji said.

Three areas that badly need volunteers are Wai'anae, Wahiawa and Waimanalo, she said. Twenty volunteers would solve those problems.

The waiting list to get meals delivered fluctuates often but has been as high as 279 people.

Demand for meals is growing as O'ahu's population ages, said Claire Shimabukuro, executive director of Hawai'i Meals on Wheels. The fastest growing population is over 85, she said.

Her volunteers deliver about 60,000 meals a year on 36 routes a day but could easily add other routes if more people helped, Shimabukuro said.

"I would say that there would be at least 10 routes that we could service if we had the volunteers," she said.

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

Some areas have waiting lists of up to 30 people.

"We always have the need for more meals, so there is always the need for more people to help deliver meals," Shimabukuro said. "We could certainly use more volunteers."

Most deliveries take less than two hours a day to complete and volunteers can sign up for a single day or a whole week.

The local programs are among more than 4,000 Meals on Wheels chapters across the country. They deliver one meal, Monday through Friday, to seniors who would otherwise go hungry.

The programs received about $715 million in federal funds this year, a number that has been "flat for the last decade," said Peggy Ingraham of the Meals on Wheels Association of America.

The volunteer shortages on the Mainland are quite serious in some cases.