Opening of fishing village set back three years

By Johnny Brannon
Advertiser Staff Writer

The state is losing up to $755,000 a year in lease revenue because methane gas contamination has delayed the opening of a new fish handling complex at Honolulu Harbor by up to three years, and fishing companies say the setbacks also have hurt O'ahu's commercial fishing industry.

A massive warehouse for fish-handling operations at Pier 38 has been empty for nearly a year, as state officials grapple with the presence of methane gas pollutants in soil at the site. The discovery of the contaminants may delay the opening of the site for three years. Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser

But a huge building the state constructed on the 16-acre site beside Nimitz Highway and Kapalama Stream remains empty more than a year after the work was completed. And vacant state-owned lots in the complex can't be privately developed until the extent of the contamination is measured and the problem is solved.

That is expected to cost up to $1.5 million more and take an additional 15 months, Department of Transportation deputy director Jadine Urasaki said.

In the meantime, new palm trees have taken firm root on the landscaped grounds, but a new pier that should be bustling every morning with fishermen unloading their catches goes unused. A smooth new parking lot stays empty too, and a shiny new restroom building remains locked.

The delays forced some businesses that had prepared to move into the Fishing Village either to look elsewhere or to pay for expensive upgrades they had hoped to avoid at their old facilities.

"They were holding off as long as they could, but there comes a point in time when you have to do it," said Frank Goto, manager of the United Fishing Agency auction house in Kewalo Basin, which hopes to move to the Fishing Village when it opens.

"It's hard to quantify whether there's been serious damage to the industry, but I believe there's been some," he said. "We hoped to be in there by now, but I guess it was not to be. If you're working on a project for this many years, you get kind of disappointed."

Goto said the overall plan for the Fishing Village is a good one, however, and that it could give the industry a strong boost once it finally opens.

The Department of Transportation began building the state facilities for the project in 1997, and the work originally was to be finished by December 2000. But construction stretched until August of last year because of the contamination concerns, Urasaki said. The full cost and time frame for mitigating the problem won't be known until a $300,000 study is completed next month, she said.

Methane is not toxic, but it can cause explosions or suffocation in high concentrations, state health officials say. It's clear now that the gas has long contaminated soil on the Fishing Village site, which once included petroleum storage tanks and pipelines.

But the state was not aware of how bad the problem was before construction began because the type of environmental study that was first conducted for the project was not required to test specifically for methane, officials said.

United Fishing Agency workers and clients check out the day's catch. The company, now in Kaka'ako, hopes to move to the Fishing Village. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

Methane is generated by the decomposition of all types of organic materials, including petroleum, he said, but is not normally such a problem.

A group of private companies studying the whole harbor area as part of a major environmental cleanup project later alerted the state to a potential methane hazard, and the DOT then took a closer look at the site, Urasaki said.

The delays are disappointing, Urasaki said, "but we're trying to mitigate something that has a potential impact on public health and safety. It's something that needs to be done."

Sen. Rod Tam, who represents the district, said he believes state officials bungled the project.

"It was poor planning by the administration," said Tam, D-13th (Downtown, Nu'uanu, Sand Island). "They could have done the proper testing but didn't do it."

Keith Kawaoka, manager of the Health Department's Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response Office, said state law only requires testing for methane when projects are built where big pockets of the gas are likely to build up, such as on a garbage landfill.

Much of the property being developed for the Fishing Village is landfill, but the area was not a garbage dump. Health officials say it is not clear whether material included in the fill caused the contamination, or whether it is a result of petroleum from tanks an oil company maintained on the site for years.

Tam said he worries the state will be stuck paying to clean up a mess made by others.

"We need to make sure the responsible parties clean it up, not brush it under the rug," he said. "This has to be done properly."

After a state environmental consultant determined the methane concentrations at the site were significant, health officials ruled that it still posed a minimal risk as long as precautions were taken, Kawaoka said.

"The idea is not to stop development per se," he said. "From a health standpoint, we're saying it's OK."

But companies that want to develop the other eight lots in the Fishing Village found they couldn't obtain bank loans because the methane posed a liability risk.

"Obviously, the delays have been costly to the fishing industry," said Jim Cook of Pacific Ocean Producers, a fish wholesaler that wants to move to the site. "Companies in older, antiquated facilities needed to move and wanted to move into this place.

"Now, the state can't expect to lease the property because the banks involved aren't going to let their customers build on this contaminated soil. What a normal developer would have done is mitigated the problems prior to construction."

Urasaki said the Department of Transportation expects to collect up to $755,000 per year in rents once all the available space is leased, but no leases had been signed so far, she said.

"We're negotiating with a couple of tenants, but they won't be able to move in until the issues are addressed," she said.

The Iwilei District Participating Parties, the business group studying environmental problems throughout the harbor district, said many other pockets of soil contain methane or other contaminants.

Virtually all the fuel and other petrochemicals used in Hawai'i entered the state through the harbor until recent years, and such problems should be expected, said the group's project manager, Larry Browning, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency engineer.

Whale oil, kerosene, petroleum, and even rotten pineapples have all helped pollute the harbor grounds over the decades, he said, but the impact measured so far has not been worse than experts would expect to find in such an industrial area.

Reach Johnny Brannon at jbrannon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8070.

Correction: Larry Browning is project manager for the Iwilei District Participating Parties. Another person was identified as such in a previous version of this story.