EPA grant to help evaluate Hanalei waters
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Kaua'i Bureau
HANALEI, Kaua'i — A recently awarded $700,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to help determine if the waters in Hanalei River and Hanalei Bay are safe for swimming, fishing and crabbing.
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Residents who use the river and bay have been concerned for years about whether their waters are safe. Those concerns led to the establishment in 1998 of Hanalei as one of 14 American Heritage Rivers, which in turn led to a number of studies and the $700,000 EPA grant for watershed protection.
Studies show that there is a significant bacterial problem in parts of Hanalei Bay. The contamination comes from Hanalei River and from cesspools and septic fields.
"This program is responding to the community," said Makaala Kaaumoana, executive director of the Hanalei Watershed Hui. "What people wanted to know is what's in the water. Is it swimmable? Is it fishable?"
Some of the programs within the grant include assessing the threats from cesspool-served homes near the Hanalei and Waipa rivers, outside the area that would be served by a town sewer, and replacing as many as a dozen of those cesspools with other sewage treatment systems.
The grant will support coral reef monitoring to determine the effect of bacteria, sediments and nutrients on the reefs of Hanalei Bay.
The EPA-financed program will work with other agencies to study the watershed areas mauka of the town to identify sources of muddy runoff. It will help pay for a sediment gauge at a U.S. Geological Survey rain and flow gauge station in the river basin.
It also will help pay for a system to reduce the flow of sediment from Hanalei's famed taro fields into the river and eventually the bay. Hanalei produces two-thirds of the state's taro for poi.
Kaaumoana said that all the work comes directly out of the community's concerns about making Hanalei's water safe for swimming and fishing.
"The Hanalei Heritage River Program is demonstrating that through cooperation, communities can successfully address critical water quality problems," said Catherine Kuhlman, acting director for the EPA's water division for the Pacific Southwest region.
The river was named a Heritage River under the Clinton administration, and it received one of 20 major grants nationally for watershed protection under the current Bush administration, through the EPA's Watershed Initiative.
Carl Berg, chief scientist for Hanalei's EPA grant program, said the community qualified for the grant because it had done studies on water quality and was ready to respond with actual programs to improve conditions in the area.
The studies included ones that showed there is a significant bacterial problem in parts of Hanalei Bay. The bacterial contamination comes both from the 16-mile-long river and from seepage from cesspools and septic fields in Hanalei town, which is built on sand.
"We were working with volunteers on a very limited budget, but over two and a half years, we made perhaps 1,000 measurements," Berg said.
They found that bacterial counts went up during low tides, when groundwater flowed toward the sea. They were also up after heavy rains, when water would flow through the ground toward the bay.
"There are 224 cesspools and 75 septic systems in Hanalei town," he said.
