ISLAND VOICES
Replenish beaches instead
By Bob Colopy
Founder and past president of the Halama Street Homeowners' Association
A Dec. 30 editorial suggests a way around the mortgage/insurance problem of the proposed shoreline rules on Maui. The editorial suggests that the government buy the properties of those whose houses burn down and thereby make the owners whole.
Then the government resells the stripped-down lot of perhaps 30 percent of its buildable area to a developer, who rebuilds it with the promise to never protect it from erosion nor hold the government liable if the house falls into the ocean.
Clearly, developers wouldn't pay very much for such a high-risk proposition, so the taxpayers would be paying a big bill.
At a government-sponsored erosion discussion on Maui in 2000, a major dredging company that does beach nourishment on the Mainland said it would be economical for it to renourish Hawai'i's beaches if it could do many of them at the same time, since the set-up costs of deploying the barges would be very expensive. When asked what it would cost to restore the major beaches of all islands and assuming there was offshore sand, he estimated in the range of $12 million.
Those numbers and assumptions may be off a bit, but it gives us some perspective and proportion for alternative uses of tax money for saving our beaches.
Your editorial ends: "These are never easy choices, but when the alternative is total loss of our beaches, preventing that outcome is a crucial public purpose." Unfortunately, Hawai'i's media are giving the public a false choice: home or beach. Why not propose a win-win solution: home and beach by stopping the erosion-causing activities as recommended in a Moffatt and Nichols study?
If we are to be sincere about saving beaches, then finding out the causes of erosion and considering beach restoration should be topics that enter the debate. They never do. Why?
Is it really too expensive to find out why we have lost our beaches when you can look up the history of our beaches in Hawai'i's own papers? Perhaps The Advertiser should reprint its own stories about mining the sand off Hawai'i's beaches to feed the concrete industry for the last century.
Most of our beach sand is in the filled-in wetlands and concrete structures now rising from where coastal wetlands acted as siltation ponds that used to protect our reefs from siltation — the source of our beach sand. When you add up all the sand removed (millions of cubic yards), it is enough to restore all the beaches.
