During and after the 50 million gallon Waikiki sewage spill, bacteria issues became an almost daily item in the Oahu news media. There were a lot of rumors going around, false information, people making news instead of reporting the news, etc. Unfortunately(for me), it was my duty to respond to the phone calls, check the lab results, openly provide media with data, make sure there was adequate monitoring, signage, made the call to post Waikiki beach and when to pull the signs. Needless to say, it was a challenging experience.

Maui County now seems to be going through similar issues with bacteria. High Enterococci counts and effluent from WWTP injection wells and staph-MRSA infections. How should the County of Maui and its major water recreational population address these issues? What are facts, what are rumors, and what does a person do to protect himself while recreating in Maui’s waters. I will address these issues in my presentation at:

Planning Department Conference Room
250 S. High Street
Wailuku, HI 96793

Date: September 1, 2010
Time: 9:00-10:30 am

Watson Okubo
Monitoring & Analysis Section Chief
Clean Water Branch
Department of Health
919 Ala Moana Blvd#301
Honolulu, Hawaii 96814
Phone: 808 586-4309

Spare a few minutes to testify in support of Jo Anne johnson’s reso on Friday July 23.The Whale sanctuary is updating their Management Plan. This is the time to get in strong language to regulate speed limits, dumping of wastes, injection wells. disruptive noises, etc in Sanctuary waters.

Mayor Charmaine Tavares’ Environmental Management wants to delete reference to injection wells.

Please come down tomorrow morning to the County Building (County Council) testify in support.

Region IX of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the State of Hawaii, and the City and County of Honolulu announced today the broad outline of a seminal settlement agreement over the future management of Honolulu’s sewage collection and treatment plant system for the next 25 years.

The City will implement a long-term schedule for upgrading its Honouliuli and Sand Island primary waste water treatment plants to more advanced secondary treatment systems.

It should be noted that this action came about as a result of citizen watchdog groups who were dissatisfied by the slipshod way that the sewage systems was being run. Maui’s Cheryl Okuma, Director of Environmental Management, was especially criticized during her tenure in Honolulu for her lack of action in maintaining and improving the system.

And you wondered why Maui is having such a hard time getting progress out of our Dept. of Environmental (Mis)Management.

June 2, 2010

Mayor Charmaine Tavares
200 S. High St.
Kalana O Maui Bldg 9th Fl
Wailuku, HI  96793

Dear Mayor Tavares,

The purpose of this letter is to notify you of my resignation from the Community Working Group on Wastewater Reuse effective immediately.

I have come to the decision to resign very reluctantly. When appointed to the Community Working Group, I had high hopes that we could come together, talk together, identify different perspectives and concerns, and work to forge a practical plan to phase out injection wells and reuse the wastewater beneficially and safely on land.

In my view, however, the process that has been employed by those guiding the Community Working Group has frustrated, not furthered, the goal of community consensus building to implement the goal you stated more than a year ago. From the beginning, we were told by those guiding the process that the Community Working Group should focus on water reuse and should not be talking about wastewater injection, ocean pollution or coral reef protection. Repeatedly, the CWG membership sought to look at the whole picture – as your own goal did, but those guiding the process have not allowed the CWG to receive briefings during meeting time from its own members on the impact of wastewater injection wells on coral reefs. This is just one example of how the process has been designed in ways that effectively prevent community dialogue and understanding of both the problem and the alternative solutions.

The process has prevented a free flowing discussion in the whole group as to how to get to a realistic plan to phase out injection wells, treat the wastewater adequately, reuse an increasing percentage of it beneficially and safely on land, and pay for all this. Instead, the CWG has been managed in a way that has frustrated the process of community education and open discussion of how to achieve your stated goal. Even the beneficial discussions that have been held have not been recorded accurately. In short, in good conscience, I can no longer participate as a representative of the DIRE Coalition in a process that I regard as essentially a sham and a waste of taxpayer money. I regretfully resign from the CWG effective immediately.

Sincerely,
Jeff Schwartz

Director of Maui Environmental (mis)Management, Cheryl Okuma, stated
that she found an unnamed University of Hawai’i staff (staph?) member
who stated that staph cannot survive in salt water.

Thus, the fact that her department pours 4-5 million gallons of R2
(un-disinfected) wastewater into the ocean off Kahului with their
injection wells is just hunky dory.

After the 100′s of paddlers and surfers who’ve gotten MRSA
(antibiotic-resistant staph) have stopped laughing, let’s ask this
so-called staff member to go swimming off Kanaha with an open sore.  I
dare you.

Cheryl Okuma is probably a clever lawyer (she has to be clever at what
she does,  to enable the County to continue breaking the Clean Water
Act, give themselves illegal SMA exemptions, etc) but she doesn’t know
____ about water quality.  (Pardon my pun)

Call the Mayor.  Tell her to quit stalling.  Clean up the water.

Karen Chun
SaveKahuluiHarbor.com

P.S. Read more in Rob Parson’s excellent Maui Time Article

During budget hearings this Friday, which included $2,000,000 for injection wells and other wastewater funding, Councilmember Wayne Nishiki and Sol Kaho’ohalahala proposed conditions to the wastewater the funds.  Department of Environmental Management is required to come up with a plan and timeline to start treating the wastewater to R1 and re-using it in order to get their funding.  The County Council passed these conditions.

Thank you, Maui County Council!

The Maui County Environmental Management stonewalled the DIRE coalition and Save Kahului Harbor at their intervention in the SMA Permit Exemption hearing.   By some real fast talking and misrepresentation, they managed to convince the Maui Planning Commission that drilling two new “replacement” injection wells a couple hundred feet away from the existing wells and putting in more piping was “refurbishment” and worthy of an exemption from SMA permit application.

Meanwhile Councilmembers Wayne Nishiki and Sol Kaho’ohalahala, fed up with the Tavares administration’s foot-dragging on bringing Maui County into compliance with the wishes of the residents to phase out injection wells (instead of building new ones) introduced language to force the Department of Environmental Management (known to many as the Department of Environmental Law Evasion)  to at least draw up plans to disinfect the water and re-use it, prior to getting the money for their new injection wells.

In an overblown stalling technique, Dave Taylor, head of wastewater (aka “A Little Sewer Water Never Hurt Anyone“) claimed the design cost would be $1 million.  To which we respond, maybe in your department, but not in the real world.

Since the 1998 EIS for the Kahului injection wells stated that it was both the intent and effect that the effluent in the wells go into the ocean, the County is violating the Clean Water Act.  Fines for this are $32,000 per day per well or in excess of  a quarter million dollars per day.

Councilmember Joe Pontanilla estimated that the construction to treat the sewage to R1 (e.g. disinfect it) and pipe it for re-use would be about $30,000,000.   Sounds like a big number given the current budget crisis.  But it is less than 4 months of fines that could be imposed at any time by the EPA.

When (not if) the EPA cracks down on the Kahului injection wells, we’ll have to just bite the bullet and pay those fines for however many months it takes to plan and construct the R1 treatment.

We can’t afford not to start planning for this immediately.

What You Can Do

Download our flyer.  Print it out and hand it out everywhere.

Call or email  your CouncilMembers and ask them to light a fire under the Wastewater Division to clean up our water before pushing it into the ocean.

The number of people hospitalized in Hawaii because of MRSA infections is twice the national average and approximately 200 people in Hawaii die from MRSA every year with the highest incidence on Maui.

Dr. Alan Tice, a professor at the University of Hawaii who specializes in infectious diseases, has identified ocean water as a potential source of MRSA.  “I think ocean water is definitely a potential source of MRSA,” Tice has said.  “We have found in Hawaii as many as 100 MRSA colonies per liter of sea water”.

It is suspected that this bacteria comes from wastewater treatment systems.  Waterborne pharmaceutical byproductspromote antibiotic-resistant germs, especially when — as in the process of wastewater treatment — they are mixed with bacteria in human sewage.

Disinfection of wastewater removes disease-causing organisms from wastewater, using either chlorine or UV light.  Chlorine is cheaper but not good for the ocean. Because UV is expensive, the County of Maui does not disinfect all wastewater that is injected into the ground at Kahului.

That water then seeps into the ocean and we surfers, paddlers, swimmers and divers reap the results – increasing  infections.  This is why we want to stop the two new Kahului injection wells  until the County either disinfect the water or redirects it.

We do not understand why Mayor Tavares is fighting us on this. Please call her at 270-7855  and ask for her support.

Turns out the leachate from the Landfill is going through the Kahului Waste Water plant.  This may explain the recent (last couple years) rise in staph infections for those using the waters around Kahului.  It was counter-intuitive that infections were going up while cruise ship use was declining.  So it may be the injection wells which we have evidence are flowing into the ocean off Kahului.