Hawaii First Water

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

February ’21 repeat of an excellent September ’20 Civil Beat article by Claire Caulfield.  (Larry note:  this is a great report on why the forests play a major role in filling the aquifers in Hawaii)

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.

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.

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.

Here is a link to the rest of this excellent article…

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

(Nov ’20) By Matt Kaplan, NYT.

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…

US Supreme Court Rules Against Maui In Major Clean Water Case

April 2020, Civil Beat, Gruber. WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Maui County can’t skirt the Clean Water Act by merely pumping its sewage into groundwater before discharging it into the ocean.

In a 6-3 opinion written by Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, the majority ruled that Maui County, like other municipalities and businesses dumping pollutants into the nation’s rivers, lakes and oceans, must have a permit to do so.

The ruling is both a rebuke of Maui County and the Trump administration, which had joined the county in arguing that the Clean Water Act should only cover waste that was discharged directly into navigable waters, and not pollutants that were first filtered through groundwater before reaching their final destination.

To See the rest of the article in the Civil Beat, click here…

Raise Your Hand: Honolulu Advertiser 2020/ Water In the Islands

(Editor Comment:  We commend high school senior Megan Okuma for her insightful article on water scarcity in the islands.)

By: Megan Okuma, Leilehua High School, Class of 2020.

As inhabitants of an island, most of Hawaii cannot fathom running out of water. However, although we are surrounded by such a precious resource, only 0.4% of the world’s water is drinkable. In Hawaii, most of our water comes from aquifers where it has traveled for years through soil and volcanic rock. This extensive, natural purifying system is the reason why Hawaii ranks first for water quality domestically. Yet with the population increasing and climate change affecting our rainfall patterns, Hawaii may see a decline of the cleanest water in the country within the next 100 years.

Conserving water is one of the easiest tasks in our environmental crisis to tackle as individuals because each of our actions directly affect the state of our water supply. We have complete control over the amount of water we use and if we take responsibility for this natural resource, we control the future of our water supply.

Water is not an infinite resource and, with a water cycle that has sustained Hawaii for ages, it makes more sense to change our habits rather than continue harvesting a finite resource with the same practices that created the problem in the first place. Of the 164 gallons of water used by residents every day, 100 gallons are used just for basic tasks: 20 to 50 gallons for showering, 18 to 24 gallons for flushing toilets and 26 gallons on running faucets. Through installing water- saving technology and routinely checking for leaks, the amount of water used can be reduced significantly.  Fortunately, there is an array of technology designed to combat the water crisis from focusing on bigger efforts like creating a new source of freshwater to simpler efforts like home instillations.

For the rest of the article see here…

Our (Water) Project in Hawaii

December 2019 (LK: this is a fascinating article on water desal using solar power to begin to reforest an area on the Big Island) by Author Yishan Wong in Medium: In considering large-scale strategies to fix climate change, it turns out that the lowest-risk, lowest-cost, and most politically feasible strategy is the massive global reforestation of 3 billion acres.

To concretely prove out key technologies and costs, we have recently completed construction of the world’s largest fully off-grid 100% solar-powered desalination facility. There are other larger desalination plants, but they are all grid-tied and/or reliant at least partially on fossil fuels. In contrast, we are completely independent and 100% powered by solar energy.

Our facility comprises a half -acre of solar panels rated at roughly 128 kW total generating power and 300 kWh of battery storage. It is designed to produce 128,000 liters/day (34,000 gallons/day, or 128 m3/day) of freshwater, more than enough to irrigate the entire property. The facility is off the grid, so we have created our own electrical and water utility.

Recent cost improvements in solar mean that green desalination is now feasible. The significance of this cannot be understated, because desalination is uniquely suited to using solar power, as it avoids the solar intermittency issue.

The area of North Kohala where our project is located used to be covered with an ancient sandalwood forest, from the mountains to the shore. Hundreds of years ago, the entire forest was cut down to supply the profitable sandalwood trade and the region never recovered. It remains a desert to this day.

For the rest of this article see it here…

How Water Footprints Can Help Us Eat Less Water

September 2019, (Editor Note: This article originally appeared in 2017 but is worth repeating because of its ability to demonstrate how much water we use without giving it much thought…  In the future, this will have to change or the lack of water will negatively impact the quality of our lives…) 

By Robin Madel and Kai Olson-Sawyer , Senior Research and Policy Analysts at GRACE Communications Foundation.

How  do we get Americans to conserve water? The first step is to show just much water it takes to make the average American’s lifestyle possible. But water conservation means a lot more than the typical advice to take shorter showers and wash fewer loads of laundry. While such actions are important, there are other ways to save much more.

Those who use GRACE Communications Foundation’s Water Footprint Calculator know that diet makes up the largest part of our individual water footprints. This is part of what’s called “virtual” water use, or the amount of water required to produce the food we eat, energy we use and the things we buy. Even though the water consumed to produce these items can’t be seen or felt, it comprises the majority of our water footprint.

Agriculture’s Big Water Footprint

In the United States, agriculture is a major surface and groundwater user. In fact, a full 80 percent of all consumptive water use in the US comes from agriculture. When the historic California drought hit two seasons ago, many were shocked by what were once considered arcane facts about the water used to produce our food. Headlines about how it takes just over one gallon of water to produce an almond were common.

Generally, the water footprint of fruits, vegetables, grains and pulses (like beans) is smaller than that of meat, dairy and nuts. Beef is the king of big water footprints: It takes about 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. This is because cattle are physically large, have relatively long lives, eat so much food and are rather inefficient at converting feed to meat (compared to, say, chickens). In the United States, most beef cattle are raised on feedlots for a large portion of their lives, and while there, they eat feed made from grains like corn, sorghum, barley and oats – lots of it. It takes a tremendous amount of water to grow feed, especially the grains that go into cattle feed. This can be problematic for strained water resources when those crops are irrigated.

In addition to water for animal feed, how and where water is used has a large impact. Crops grown in areas with abundant rainfall tend to put less pressure on water resources. On the other hand, thirsty crops grown in arid locations or areas prone to drought can challenge sustainable water use when irrigation is necessary. There are additional challenges when vulnerable water sources are used to boost crop yields. For example, irrigation nearly doubled from 2002 to 2016 in the water-stressed Republican River basin through parts of Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.

Competition between different types of water users is another source of trouble. A large share of US crops are grown in areas where such competition for water exists, as is the case in California and other arid Western states, the drought-prone Southeast and even the Great Plains where a major aquifer is being drained from agricultural overuse. Different sectors, including energy, industry, residential and the natural environment, all have specific water demands that compete with agriculture.

In the end, no location is immune from drought or water resource problems, even if only on a temporary basis. As rainfall and drought patterns continue to shift and intensify, water supplies will become increasingly stressed, which will have an inordinate effect on farming and food production. To use water more sustainably, farmers and food companies find that they must measure and understand how water is used along the production chain, which helps them recognize the extent of their water use and identify areas where they can cut back. At the same time, farmers, ranchers and other producers must be aware of water pollution that occurs within the process. This is important because pollution increases water use since more water is required to help clean up pollution.

For the rest of this article see…

Maui County Running Out Of Time To Settle Clean Water Act Case

Aug 2019: Civil Beat: Author: Nathan Eagle; Maui County Council members are expected to decide Tuesday (3 Sept 2019)  if they want to go against Mayor Michael Victorino and settle a major Clean Water Act case instead of letting a conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court decide it in November.

The four environmental groups that brought the lawsuit delivered petitions this week with more than 15,000 signatures to Council Chair Kelly King. They are urging the council to step in now so it can spare the county — and the country — from an unfavorable judgment.

The Hawaii Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club-Maui Group, Surfrider Foundation and West Maui Preservation Association sued in 2012 after trying for years to reach an agreement with the county over its Lahaina wastewater reclamation facility, which has been releasing treated water into the ground that ends up entering the ocean and harming coral reefs.

The conflict revolves around the adverse effect of the effluent discharge on the coral reefs and marine ecosystem at Kahekili on Maui.

District and appeals courts have ruled that the county needs a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit for the facility, which handles about 3 million to 5 million gallons of sewage a day. It serves about 40,000 people. 

But Victorino is fighting that decision and has succeeded in getting the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Environmentalists are concerned that the court’s decision would gut the Clean Water Act, a situation that would have implications far beyond Hawaii.

For the rest of the Civil Beat article click here…

Hawaii Climate Change Panel Discussion – April 25, 2019

July 2018

Climate Change Panel Discussion – April 25, 2019

APRIL 25, 2019 – Members of the Board of Water Supply Stakeholder Advisory Group had the opportunity to learn about the impact of climate change on Hawaii.

Video Presentation Links (Vimeo)

If you would like to watch a specific presentation or just the Q&A, please use the following Vimeo links.

  1. Presentation by Dr. Charles H. Fletcher, III (Chip), UH Manoa, SOEST – Part I
  2. Presentation by Dr. Thomas Giambelluca, UH Manoa, Department of Geography and Environment
  3. Presentation by Dr. Charles H. Fletcher, III (Chip), UH Manoa, SOEST – Part II
  4. Presentation by Joshua Stanbro, Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency
  5. Presentation by Barry Usagawa, Board of Water Supply, Water Resources Division
  6. Question & Answer Session: Climate Change Panel

Opinion: House Bill 1326 Regarding Maui Stream Diversion

By Gary Hooser | April 21, 2019/ Star Advertiser Opinion:

In my 20 years of experience in government, politics and policy-making, House Bill 1326 is the most egregious example of special-interest legislation I have ever seen.

Fortunately the state Senate has taken time to listen to public concerns. After weighing both sides, conducting a thorough public hearing, asking tough questions and even visiting the Maui community most impacted, the Senate led by Water and Land Committee Chairman Kai Kahele has decided to shelve HB 1326.

Key Senate members have stated publicly they have no intention of passing HB 1326, but technically, it remains alive. Until the session ends May 2, anything can happen.

Alexander & Baldwin (A&B) stands to gain or lose $62 million, depending on the outcome of HB 1326. In essence, it is attempting to sell public trust water rights derived from stream diversions in east Maui. The intended beneficiary of this transaction is Mahi Pono — a California-based LLC, financed by a Canadian pension fund — which recently purchased the majority of A&B lands on Maui.

One fairly significant problem with this proposal is that A&B neither owns, nor has long-term control over this water.

In Hawaii, whether beneath the ground or flowing through our rivers and streams, water is a public trust resource. Businesses may use the resource, but must secure a permit that ensures sufficient water remains in the stream to preserve its natural ecosystem and that down-stream users also have access.

Yet this one company, the last remnant of the “Big 5” plantation era, and arguably the most politically powerful private landowner in Hawaii, is attempting, with the Legislature’s help, to secure those water rights without securing the proper long-term permits, and then transfer those water rights to Mahi Pono — pocketing a cool $62 million in the process.

The original HB 1326 proposed giving A&B and a handful of others an unlimited amount of time to divert an unlimited amount of water, without securing the permits and without ensuring environmental or down-stream user protections.

The present measure, HB 1326 House Draft 2, allows them 10 years, three of which have already passed, to comply with permitting requirements and convert their “temporary” one-year revocable permits (RPs) to proper long-term water leases.

Though A&B is the primary proponent and largest beneficiary of the measure, nine other RPs also are impacted by HB 1326 HD2, including some utilized by small ranchers and farmers.

The current controversy surrounding the plight of the small farmer and rancher is a manufactured crisis, perpetuated by the primary beneficiaries of HB 1326 HD2 and designed to promote fear and uncertainty.

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) has issued RPs to small users in the past without a problem. There is no specific legal impediment that prevents DLNR from extending the temporary RPs of these particular small farmers and ranchers while they pursue long-term leases.

The DLNR could provide certainty today, to all concerned by simply announcing its intent to continue extending the RPs of small users, so long as they demonstrate good faith and positive intent in pursuing a proper long-term water lease.

To his credit, Kahele, while acknowledging that DLNR could act unilaterally to resolve the situation, offered up a compromise that protected the little guy, while holding A&B accountable. Unfortunately, this overture was rejected.

The underlying problem is DLNR’s inability to manage the permit process. However, it’s neither the Legislature’s job nor in the public’s best interest to attempt to fix bad management with bad special-interest legislation.

And it’s certainly not the Legislature’s job to bail out a company that sold water rights it does not own.

It’s time the Legislature demand that the DLNR do its job. We, the collective community and the Legislature, need to move past the distraction and passions generated by HB 1326, and focus instead on the myriad other important bills begging for our time and attention.

Gary Hooser, a former state senator and Kauai Council member, is board president of Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action (HAPA) and executive director of Pono Hawaii Initiative.