Sewer upgrades to cost $1.6 billion

By Robbie Dingeman
Advertiser Health Writer

The city plans to spend $1.6 billion by 2017 to improve O'ahu's aging sewer system, a system that showed its vulnerability when a year-end rainstorm triggered sewage spills that put many beaches off-limits for days.

Workers from Westcon Microtunneling Inc. work on new sewer lines on North Kalaheo Avenue in Kailua, an eight-year project expected to cost $51 million. Kailua Beach was among O'ahu beaches affected by sewage spills from recent rains. Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser

The spills occurred when days of heavy rains saturated the ground and got into cracks in sewer pipes, overloading the system and causing sewage spills into a dozen O'ahu beaches and streams.

"We have terrible rains. How do we plan for them?" Kailua resident Bob Popp said after contaminated-water warning signs stayed up at Kailua Beach for five days. Popp, 64, a retired Navy man who teaches political science at Hawai'i Pacific University, said he would keep his grandchildren out of the ocean there until next month.

Such widespread spills have become less frequent. The number of sewage spills on O'ahu declined 60 percent from 1994 to 2003, while spending on sewer system improvements swelled from $21 million in 1994 to $105.7 million in 2003.

Officials ramped up the pace of improvements under pressure from a 1995 federal court agreement to improve the sewer system. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency charged that the city for years had allowed "chronic overflows and spills" of raw and partially treated sewage.

The EPA said poor maintenance of the system had resulted in 300 spills into Honolulu waters "including a spill of 50 million gallons of raw sewage into Pearl Harbor in 1991 that attracted national attention," an EPA report said.

The city has made major improvements in recent years and is planning more, said Kathi Moore, EPA branch chief in San Francisco who oversees how well Honolulu and other cities within the region are complying with the federal regulations of the Clean Water Act.

The city is working with federal officials on multimillion-dollar, long-term improvements and is taking the problems seriously, Moore said. "It's going to take a long time and a lot of money to get there," she said.

Signs of the sewer projects are visible islandwide: deep trenches, streets that are detoured for months and huge lengths of pipe lying roadside.

Major projects include reconstruction of sewers along Nimitz Highway, in Kailua and along Fort Weaver Road in 'Ewa Beach as well as a complex $390 million upgrade to the Sand Island treatment plant, the state's largest.

"We've got some pipes out there that are a hundred years old and they're in pretty good shape and others just 15 years old that are in bad shape," said Tim Steinberger, director of the city Department of Design and Construction.

Moore said Honolulu's problems are typical of wet-weather sewage spills nationwide. "It's a national priority with EPA," she said.

The city's sewer system processes 110.8 million gallons of wastewater a day from 2,100 miles of sewer lines. There are eight city-run treatment plants on the island.

City Councilman Gary Okino said he sees progress on the big job of repairing and improving the sewer system, but questions why the city wasn't more aggressive earlier.

He notes a spike in spending during the past three years. "We've been trying to address the problem, but I think we could have done more," Okino said.

And in the past three budget years, the city administration transferred $122 million from the sewer fund to the city's general treasury, a move criticized by some council members as short-sighted in light of the huge spending needed to keep up with the sewer system. Mayor Jeremy Harris has defended the practice as simply paying back the general fund for sewer costs of previous years.

Okino said all of that money could have been spent to continue to repair and renovate the sewer system.

"I think some sewage spills would have been unavoidable with the rains we had," but others could have been prevented, he said. "We're doing an adequate job, but it probably could have been better if we'd got on it sooner."

Tim Houghton, deputy director of the city Department of Environmental Services, said improvement projects lagged a bit because from 1995 to 1999 city officials focused on assessing the system to determine what the right repairs should be. "It's done after diligent and proper planning," he said.

Experts say the intense year-end storm would have been a tough challenge for any sewer system. Kevin Kodama, a National Weather Service hydrologist, said the storm dumped a month's worth of rain on several communities in one week, from Dec. 27 to Jan. 4. "It was widespread over pretty much the entire island, and it lasted a long time," he said.

Kodama pointed to weekly rainfall totals of 13 to 15 inches in Kailua and Waimanalo, two of the areas with sewage overflows.

"It was a significant storm but not a record-breaking storm," he said.

Steinberger said the overflows are worsened when homeowners open their clean-out valves to drain their yards, channel runoff from their gutters into the sewer system or have leaky pipes.

Educating people about how to keep rain from overloading the system can help ease some of the problems, but very heavy rains are hard to handle for any city, Moore said.

"You'll never have zero spills anywhere when you're trying to handle that much water in so short a time," Moore said. "The goal is to have as few spills as possible."

Reach Robbie Dingeman at rdingeman@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2429.

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A massive job: Repairing O'ahu's aging sewer system The city's ambitious and costly plan to upgrade the island's sewer system is supposed to make the system reliable for years.