Hawaii First Water

Hawaii’s Fresh Water Leaks to the Ocean Through Underground Rivers

By Matt Kaplan, NYT. (NOV)

There are few things on the island of Hawaii that are more valuable than fresh water. This is not because the island is dry. There is plenty of rain. The trouble is that there is tremendous demand for this water and much of it that does accumulate on the island’s surface disappears before it can be used.

New research by marine geophysicists reveals that underground rivers running off the large island’s western coast are a key force behind this vanishing act.

Fresh water is often pumped on the island from aquifers formed from rain at higher elevations where it is easy to access. The drawback is that if too much water gets pumped to meet demand, little remains to travel through rocks to farms and fragile ecosystems that depend upon it. To make matters worse, recent studies of this water labeled with isotopes and tracked over time have revealed that these aquifers are also heavily leaking somewhere else.

“Everyone assumed that this missing fresh water was seeping out at the coastline or traveling laterally along the island,” said Eric Attias, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii, who led the new study published Wednesday in Science Advances. “But I had a hunch that the leak might be subsurface and offshore.”

The big island of Hawaii is like an iceberg. Only a tiny fraction of the island sticks out of the ocean. The rest is submerged. To study the hydrogeology of these sections, Dr. Attias turned to electromagnetic imaging.
Ocean water conducts electricity exceptionally well because of the presence of dissolved salt ions. By comparison, fresh water is a rather poor conductor. Aware of these different electrical properties, Dr. Attias worked with a team at Scripps Institute of Oceanography to tow a 3,200-foot long system behind a boat that emitted electromagnetic fields down through the submerged coastal rocks near Hualalai volcano on the west coast.

 

ImageDr. Eric Attias and his team deploying the controlled-source electromagnetic sounding device off the coast of Hawaii.
Credit…University of Hawai’i

Dr. Attias’ work shows that within the rock of the island below the waves, there are underground rivers of fresh water flowing 2-½ miles out into the ocean. These rivers are flowing through fractured volcanic rock and surrounded by porous rocks that are saturated with salt water. Between all of this salt water and the flowing fresh water are thin layers of rock formed from compacted ash and soil that appear to be impermeable and thus keeping the two types of water separated. In total, these rivers appear to contain enough fresh water to fill about 1.4 million Olympic swimming pools.

For the rest of the article see

For Honolulu, Rising Seas Deliver Flood Risks Three Ways

OCT 2020/Brett Walton, Circle of Blue/

Build a wall?

The biggest source of flooding linked to sea-level rise for Hawaii’s capital city comes not from the sea itself. It comes from underground.

It seems like an intuitive response for protecting a coastal city from rising seas. Just raise your external defenses. But the intuitive response, in certain cases, is also the wrong response, says Shellie Habel.

If the plan to prevent flooding in a city like Honolulu were to be simply block the ocean, “it’s not going to work,” Habel told Circle of Blue. Water has other, less obvious ways of invading, and that stealth movement has implications for water pollution and transportation in Hawaii’s largest city.

Habel is a coastal geologist with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and Hawaii Sea Grant. She is the lead author on a study that investigated three flooding pathways in Honolulu, all of which are a consequence of rising seas. The study is the first to attribute the percent of flooded area in the city that is due to each factor individually and in combination. The likelihood that floods will come from multiple pathways simultaneously — and cause more infrastructure damage — rises along with the seas.

In Honolulu’s case, a sea wall would be a losing strategy against sea-level rise because a wall would not address the most serious flooding problem. The largest source of inundation for the city’s roughly 350,000 residents is not the ocean. It’s groundwater.

Habel and her colleagues found that little more than 2 to 3 percent of flooded area in Honolulu’s urban core is a result only of overland marine flooding. That range holds for the four sea-level elevations that the study looked at.

Groundwater flooding, by contrast, is the predominant individual source of flooding. How does this happen? Groundwater in the coastal region is hydrologically connected to the ocean. When the Pacific swells, so does the inland water table.

A hypothetical wall on the Honolulu waterfront would fail to prevent flooding, Habel said, because water would still bubble up from underground and come through backed up storm drains, which are the third flooding pathway. Groundwater flooding today swamps basements and roadways in low-lying areas and is noticeable in underground parking garages.

“So even if you put in a sea wall, even if you change the type of drainage management, you still have flooding,” she said, adding that a solution that only addresses marine flooding will not work because 97 percent of the total area that is projected to flood will still flood from rising groundwater and storm drain backups. Places like New Orleans and cities in the Netherlands, which also have groundwater flooding problems, employ pumps for that purpose. “In order to mitigate all the flooding you have to adapt to all three pathways.”

For the rest of this article see…

How Efforts To Save Hawaii’s Forests Are Preventing A ‘Freshwater Crisis’

Sept/ Civil Beat; Claire Caulfield.

When Serene Smalley hikes into the Koolau mountains, her goal is to kill as many plants as possible. Armed with a machete and syringes full of herbicide earlier this summer, her sights were set on the mule’s foot fern: a giant Jurassic-looking plant.

Smalley pulled out her cellphone, scrolling through a map app with hundreds of white pins. Each GPS marker pins the suspected location of a mule’s foot fern. A local conservationist spent weeks during the pandemic combing through satellite images and identifying the GPS coordinates of mule’s foot ferns on the mountain range.

Oahu Watersheds Poamoho Wahiawa Serene Smalley Invasive Fern

Serene Smalley uses a machete to fell branches of the fern before injecting a small amount of pesticide into the base of the plant.

Credit: Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

To the untrained eye, a mule’s foot fern can look like a native plant, the hapuu fern. “The hapuu is very lacy and pretty,” she said, while the fond of the invasive fern is pointed. “Which reminds me of a snake.”

Some of the offending ferns are right off the Poamoho Ridge Trail near Wahiawa, but to reach others she will have to scale steep slopes in the rain. Smalley invested $60 in specialized shoes that look like hooves and have metal spikes embedded in the soles for traction. They were designed for fishermen and she uses duct tape to stabilize her ankles for the long hike ahead.

For six years Smalley has been scaling mountains, camping on remote peaks and navigating mudslides to kill thousands of non-native plants. She’s one of only about a dozen elite volunteers trusted by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources to assist in the dangerous task of eradicating invasive plants from the nearly 2.2 million acres of protected forests across the state.

“I can definitely see progress,” Smalley said. “It’s very, very rewarding.”

Oahu Watersheds Poamoho Wahiawa Summit Wide

Watersheds provide clean drinking water, carbon sequestration and help prevent floods and droughts. A University of Hawaii study estimated the Koolau Range provides between $7.4 billion and $14 billion in value to the state.

Credit: Kuʻu Kauanoe/Civil Beat

These volunteers, along with hundreds of state employees, dozens of environmental groups and an army of local hunters are fighting an uphill battle to protect Hawaii’s forests — and Hawaii’s drinking water.

The efforts involve coordinating a diverse group of stakeholders that don’t always see eye-to-eye, expensive land acquisitions, millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fencing and excursions to some of the most remote areas of the island to remove invasive plants.

All this work is amid a backdrop of climate change, which the Honolulu Board of Water supply says is a top threat to drinking water security on the island.

More than 90% of Hawaii’s drinking water comes from aquifers: underground reservoirs of freshwater. Rising sea levels will make some freshwater aquifers turn brackish.

Hawaii’s population has almost doubled since statehood, and pre-pandemic the state was seeing a record number of visitors. But rainfall patterns have taken the opposite trajectory: decreasing at least 18% in the past 30 years, said state sustainability coordinator Danielle Bass.

Healthy forests could provide a one-two punch to the effects of climate change in Hawaii: sequestering carbon and allowing freshwater aquifers to recharge with rainfall.

“Without the necessary coordination and action, we risk a potential freshwater crisis for Hawaii’s future,” Bass said.

 

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Mayor: Maui Will Not Withdraw Supreme Court Appeal in Lahaina Injection Well Case

(Editor Comment:  Environmentalists would like to settle this case out of court fearing that a more conservative Supreme Court will weaken the Federal Clean Water Act.)

October 2019: Maui Now: Wendy Osher: Maui Mayor Michael Victorino says the County of Maui will not withdraw its appeal of the Lahaina injection well case from consideration by the US Supreme Court.

He is now seeking clarification from the high court saying, “I want Maui County taxpayers and ratepayers to have their day before the US Supreme Court and get clarity on this important question on the application of the Clean Water Act.”

In a statement issued on Friday, Mayor Victorino said:

“To allow this to go unanswered leaves us vulnerable to more lawsuits, to uncertain regulatory requirements and staggering costs – all for what would be a negligible environmental benefit. The legal exposure is immense, not only for the County but for private property owners as well. It goes far beyond injection wells. The Ninth Circuit’s decision means that many County facilities – including Parks, Public Works, Environmental Management are likely in violation of the federal law as it’s interpreted by this court. Penalties can be imposed of nearly $55,000 per day per source. The effect on private property values, and the associated property taxes which fund the majority of County operations, cannot be ignored.”

Attached is Mayor Victorino’s letter to Maui County residents and a Corporation Counsel opinion on settlement authority. Letters, memorandums and other documents connected with the case can be found online.

Four community groups, represented by Earthjustice (Sierra Club and the Surfrider Foundation, with support from Hawai‘i Wildlife Fund and West Maui Preservation Association) filed a complaint with in Hawai‘i Federal District Court in 2012, alleging that Maui County was in violation of the Clean Water Act for its injection well discharges of municipal wastewater into the Pacific Ocean just offshore of Kahekili Beach Park in West Maui.

The groups claim that pollutants from the Lahaina Wastewater Reclamation Facility are flowing to the ocean and harming coral reefs.  Environmental groups who brought the lawsuit say they’re asking the County to fix nearshore deadzones and give Maui’s reefs a chance to recover.

The rest of the Maui Now article is here….

Maui County committee agrees to settle injection well case

September 2019; WAILUKU, Maui (AP) — County officials have recommended settling with environmental groups that sued over the use of injection wells.

Members of the Maui County Committee on Governance, Ethics, and Transparency voted 5-3 to recommend that the full council settle and remove the case ahead of U.S. Supreme Court consideration in November.

See the rest of the article here...

Maps Show How Water Can Be a Precious Lifeline—or a Deadly Weapon

A new atlas by “guerrilla cartographers” explores the importance of water in everything from ancient mythology to modern warfare.

By Greg Miller (National Geographic)

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED

In the recent conflicts in Iraq and Syria, water has often been used as a weapon. When ISIS seized the Fallujah Barrage, a dam on the Euphrates River, in 2014, they raised the floodgates to deprive downstream cities of water.

Later, they released water from the dam in an attempt to flood approaching Iraqi forces, which eventually recaptured the dam in 2016. (See “What You Need to Know About the World’s Water Wars.”)

Water touches every aspect of human life, sometimes in unexpected ways, says Darin Jensen, a cartographer at the University of California and founder of a nonprofit group called Guerrilla Cartography.

The group’s latest project, Water: An Atlas, takes an unconventional look at the importance of water through more than 80 maps, including one showing the sites where water has played a role in the conflict with ISIS (included in the gallery above).

The maps in the atlas come from artists, activists, academics, and other mapmakers. Like the group’s first atlas, which focused on food issues, it was a crowdsourced effort. Organizers picked the theme and solicited contributions.

If interested in viewing article please see..

Also this Atlas is published on Square 

 

Hawaii’s record 2018 rains may foretell wetter times ahead

September: With warmer atmospheres and oceans, monster deluges may become ever more common there and elsewhere.
Matthew Cappucci: Science News for Students
Residents of Hawaii have survived several major deluges this year. And scientists say a warming climate may make such record-breakers ever more common.

One year ago, Hurricane Harvey shattered the U.S. record for most rain to come down in a single storm. Last month, another hurricane dropped record rains, this time on Hawaii. Named Lane, its measured tally would seem to be the highest ever for this island state, and second nationally only to what Harvey unleashed on Texas.

The previous record for a tropical cyclone in Hawaii was measured at Kanalohuluhulu Ranger Station. That was during Hurricane Hiki in 1950.

The National Weather Service in Honolulu has now confirmed that Lane dropped 132.13 centimeters (52.02 inches) of rain between August 22 and 26. That total comes from an official government rain gauge on the Big Island (named Hawaii). “The previous record was 132.08 centimeters (52.00 inches),” the NWS reported in an August 27 statement. This, it concluded, shows that “Hurricane Lane has broken the Hawaii tropical cyclone storm-total rainfall record.”

However, NWS pointed out, this record will stand only “pending verification.” Confirming the feat requires a special probe. A meteorologist at the NWS forecast office said that could take months.

link to the rest of the article…

Officials to discuss elevated risk cesspools pose…

West Hawaii Today; Max Dible, 25 June 2018:  Every day cesspools throughout Hawaii send an excess of harmful nutrients pouring into nearshore ocean water and threatening to infiltrate the freshwater drinking supply.  Hawaii island is home to tens of thousands of them representing nearly half of the known cesspools used throughout the state.  With the deadline of 2050 to shut down every one of them, the State Department of Health has scheduled informational community meetings in both Kailua Kona and Hilo…

…When cesspool seepage intermingles with ground water, it can find its way into aquifer drawn on by the county.  This is generally less of a concern at the deep well sites, which can range between 1,000 and 2,000 feet in depth and supply Hawaii island with most of its drinking water…

For the rest of the article see…

 

17-19 July 2018 Construction Stormwater Quality Workshops

Enhance your ability to efficiently serve your clients, in a
manner compliant with the new Hawaii Water Quality Rules. Learn
the latest “how to” and best practices for design, plans
review, construction, and post construction stormwater
quality, one year in to implementing the new Water Quality
Rules. The workshop is expected to include staff leaders
from within the City and the design and construction
industry working together to protect our waters.

This is the link to the registration…

 

 

New State of Hawaii Brown Water Beach Website

December:  (Kobayashi Comment: This new State of Hawaii website is an excellent example of the fusion of GIS mapping capabilities with water data.  I strongly support such efforts and commend the DOH and Clean Water Branch for taking this first step)

HONOLULU — The Hawaii State Department of Health (DOH) Clean Water Branch has developed a newly upgraded website that gives the public access to up-to-date information — integrated with aerial photos from Google maps — to check on the status of the water quality of beaches that may have a surge in bacteria levels or are being impacted by sewage spills. This website is part of a revised statewide beach monitoring and notification system.

The new features and functions of the website, developed in part from a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), were based on feedback from those within the health department as well as external stakeholders. The website is part of an integrated notification system that includes warning signs posted at selected beaches throughout the state.

This is the link to the new website…