Hawaii First Water

Archives for April 2016

Contaminated Water: When Should the Public Be Warned?

By Nathan Eagle; Civil Beat, 4 April 2016.

The state found high levels of bacteria in a Kauai stream, but posted no warnings because the waste is from animals. Surfrider Foundation says that’s a problem statewide.

State health officials are blaming the fecal waste of feral pigs, sheep, rats, birds and possibly a dozen land tortoises for polluting a stream that people frequent on the south shore of Kauai.

The Department of Health acknowledged in a long-awaited report last week that it has concerns about the public health issue at Waiopili Stream, but it won’t post warning signs about the extremely high levels of enterococcus detected in water surveys because no direct sources of human sewage could be identified.

The bacteria, a widely used indicator of fecal contamination, is found in animal and human intestines and can cause serious, even life-threatening diseases. Health officials maintain that when it’s in animal waste, it’s not nearly as dangerous to humans as their own sewage.

They have no plans to definitively determine whether the animals pose a significant risk of illness to humans.

The Surfrider Foundation has fought for years to have the department at least post warning signs when enterococcus levels exceed safe limits. The nonprofit organization, which independently tests water quality around Hawaii, contends it’s a statewide problem.

“It is irrelevant at very high concentrations whether that is human waste or animal waste; it is still a public health risk,” said Carl Berg, Surfrider’s Kauai chapter chair. The marine biologist and research scientist has been testing water quality on the Garden Isle for 20 years.

See the rest of the article and the Report here

The County of Maui is already in hot water over sewage in the ocean off West Maui…

April 2016; Maui Times, Anthony Pignataro

The County of Maui’s violation of the Clean Water Act by discharging millions of gallons of wastewater into injection wells in West Maui is widely known. The judge’s ruling came in 2014 , two years after environmental organizations filed suit, alleging that the injection wells were significantly harming coral reefs in the Lahaina area–most notably, at Honolua Bay and Kahekili Beach (Old Airport Beach). In fact, studies have shown that coral at Honolua has decreased by an astonishing 76 percent since 1995, while other research has shown that because of freshwater seeps just offshore of Kahekili, a great deal of wastewater floats to the surface at that beach, which is very popular with locals and tourists alike.

What hasn’t gotten so much attention is that the county also uses injection wells at its wastewater treatment facilities in Kahului and Kihei–and a new study  published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin  shows that the South Maui waste plume dwarfs anything found in West Maui.

See the rest of the article here…

 

Most Islands Are Too Small to Register In Climate Models, but They’re in Trouble

Newsweek, 4/12/2016

For people living on the thousands of islands that dot the seas, climate change isn’t just a threat. Sea level rise is already eating their land from the coast lines inward, and in some cases threatening to sink them entirely. But new research suggests that by mid-century, 73 percent of all islands may have drinking water shortages to contend with too. That means 18 million people might not have enough freshwater to drink. And that not-so-small detail is not currently included in our global climate models.

For example, the tiny island of Nauru in the North Pacific has no drinkable groundwater nor any rivers or streams to provide safe drinking water. Changes in rainfall and increased evaporation due to a warming climate make it particularly vulnerable to drought, and more than half of Nauruans report worrying about their near-future water supply.

But the scale of global climate models means that a lot of granular information like the potential for climate change to come down hard on a small speck of land like Nauru simply gets left out. It’s akin to when the pixels in a digital image are too big to capture small details, like freckles on a person’s nose, explains Kris Karnauskas, an oceans and climate scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. In fact, in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, maps showing changes in groundwater leave the oceans almost completely blank—the climate models do not get to resolution high enough to capture the tiniest islands. So these islands and their populations are “computationally disenfranchised,” in their exclusion from global data, Karnauskas said in a statement.

Karnauskas is the lead author on a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday that looked at this massive information gap, and estimated that 73 percent of the world’s islands, representing about 18 million people, are threatened with climate-induced drought and aridity in the near-term, and impact that isn’t accounted for in climate models. That’s up by large margin from the previous 50 percent estimate, which only looked at how changes in rainfall would affect freshwater supply; Karnauskas’s model also included how much evaporation would change under a warmed climate, which could accelerate the drying-out of the majority of islands by 2050.

For the rest of the article see here…

 

Warming up: As droughts continue, Hawaii must protect its freshwater

(April 2016, Editor Comment:  This is a timely and well presented editorial by Senator Gabbard and Rep. Yamane of the problems facing the island’s fresh water future.   We applaud the legislature’s 2015 water bills and look forward to the new session’s legislation.  The new bills must begin to address both conservation and reuse on the islands to get ahead of future scarcities.)
Honolulu Star Advertiser – March 27, 2016
By: Sen. Mike Gabbard and Rep. Ryan Yamane

Last October, after an unseasonable and unprecedented rainy summer, the U.S. Drought Monitor declared that for the first time since April 15, 2008 no part of our island chain was suffering from drought.

For seven long years, our farmers, ranchers and citizens had endured a prolonged dry period throughout Hawaii that caused cattle herds to be thinned, crops to suffer and spiked our rate of forest fires. Unfortunately, our relief was short-lived.

Today, just five months later, 54 percent of our island area is again locked in “moderate drought” and 100 percent of our islands are “abnormally dry.” As we live through one of the largest El Niño events on record, our islands may get even drier through 2016.

Why is this happening now? Long-term climate change trends seem to be bringing drought to Hawaii more frequently. Over the past 30 years as temperatures have risen, our average annual rainfall amount has fallen by a staggering 22 percent. Our beloved tradewind days have declined by 28 percent — from an average of 291 trade wind days in 1973 to only 210 in 2009. And when we do get rain, increasingly it tends to come in large — even epic — events where several inches may fall in just a few hours, causing stormwater runoff instead of the soft, gentle rains that slowly seep into the soil and our precious island aquifers for later use.

The Legislature understands that water is the lifeblood of our society, and long-term fresh water security is a key element to our economic health and our unique quality of life. Even as we address critical issues such as homelessness and health care this session, we acknowledge the need to work proactively to protect our fresh water supply.

We have watched the sobering experience of California as it suffered through $2.74 billion in damage to its economy in 2015 alone as a result of the ongoing drought and water supply problems — and the clear lesson is that a few ounces of prevention are far better than many tons of cure. We are moving to preserve our supply of the best drinking water in the world with innovative new solutions and policies.
Last year in 2015, the Legislature passed several key bills signed by Gov. David Ige that will help enable water infrastructure upgrades, encourage water recycling at state facilities, and capture stormwater runoff before it enters our oceans.

This legislative session we are building on this foundation with another comprehensive package of fresh water bills that will decrease water system leaks (House Bill 2041); foster public-private partnerships to reuse, conserve and recharge our water (House Bills 2029 and 2040); commit to statewide water reuse and recycling (House Bill 1749); improve storm water retention and capture (House Bill 1750); and provide incentives to residents who adopt water-saving devices in their homes (House Bill 2042).

In concert with these policy changes, the independent, nonprofit Hawai‘i Community Foundation recently released a report from a blue-ribbon commission that said to ensure water security, Hawaii must secure 100 million gallons a day in additional, reliable fresh water supply by 2030 even as less rain falls on our Islands.

We have embraced this challenge and will continue to improve our water policies in ways that move us toward this shared statewide goal.

While these policy changes are an important start, all of us need to work together planting trees, turning off the tap, and — most importantly — teaching our keiki the value of wai in order to truly protect our shared water future.