Posted on: Wednesday, June 9, 2004

EDITORIAL
O'ahu's water supply is cause for concern

The state has just emerged from one of the wettest rainy seasons in the past 30 years, yet the Honolulu Board of Water Supply is still thinking about asking O'ahu residents to resume the same voluntary summertime water conservation measures that have applied in recent drought years.

That should set off some serious alarm bells about the sustainability of our current water-use practices, and even the wisdom of the pace of new development here.

The wet winter might have restored water levels in O'ahu wells to where they were before five years of drought, if most of that rainwater could have been absorbed as it fell.

But because it rained hard enough to saturate the ground, much of the water ran off into the ocean. Another important reason for the high amount of runoff is that we've paved over a substantial percentage of our land area, or covered it with buildings, so rain is channeled into storm sewers instead of recharging our aquifers.

So even if we don't build the tens of thousands of new homes that have been planned, along with their driveways, streets, sidewalks and parking lots, the viability of our precious supply of drinking water is already dependent on the vagaries of the weather.

If this pattern continues, we eventually will be forced to think about limiting the population that depends on our finite water supplies.

Before that happens, we should look at ways to augment those supplies, such as building catchment reservoirs to capture rainfall before it is lost as runoff.

And it clearly is time to stop using 100 million gallons a day of the world's best drinking water to flush our sewage through outfalls into the ocean.