VOLCANIC ASH
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By David Shapiro
Hilo Bay, a scoop of diverse coastline from Keaukaha to the Hamakua Coast, is one of Hawai'i's scenic jewels.
The view from Banyan Drive, across the bay to the ageless city of Hilo nestled at the foot of Mauna Kea, is downright spiritual — especially during serendipitous sunsets when colors shimmer on the water and no rain clouds obstruct the mountaintop.
When you're embraced by this panorama, feeling as close to oneness with the universe as you'll ever get, it hits like a sucker punch when you remember that Hilo Bay has been one of Hawai'i's worst cesspools throughout modern times.
Advertiser library photo | Jan. 25, 2003
It's been a dump for raw sewage from the city, sugar cane bagasse from the old mills and contaminated silt washed down the Wailuku and Wailoa rivers from developments upstream — all trapped in the bay by the two-mile breakwater that provides safe shipping lanes.
A lone fisherman worked the rocks in Hilo Bay in this 2003 photo. More fishermen can now be seen casting for fish they say they'll eat.
The Advertiser's Kevin Dayton reports that Hilo Bay is returning to some health decades after the worst of the environmental offenses ceased, and officials are studying ways to help Mother Nature along.
The sewage outfall was moved outside the breakwater nearly 40 years ago, and the sugar mills shut down more than 25 years ago.
Still, the water is disturbingly murky after heavy rains, and the bay's coral reef and marine life still suffer from the decades of pollution.
Few Hiloans consider the bay safe for swimming; its lovely black-sand beach is usually deserted except for members of canoe clubs, who risk staph infections to practice and race on the wide expanse of calm water.
But hope abounds among the increasing number of shoreline casters you see catching fish that they say they intend to eat.
It used to be a lot worse.
In my teens, just before the sewage outfall was moved outside the breakwater, young surfers couldn't resist the excellent winter waves that would rise up in Hilo Bay a few times a year.
We'd hold our noses and do the best we could to paddle around the solid sewage we euphemistically called "blind mullets," the used tampons and condoms, the occasional soiled diaper.
When we wiped out, we'd be snagged by so much stringy bagasse that we felt like we were in the clutches of giant squid.
As I said, when the waves in Hilo Bay were good, they were really good — and worth the long, scalding showers we'd have to take afterward.
Our fishing consisted of going after baby hammerhead sharks to tag their fins so researchers could track their movements later in life. Alas, if the poor things lived long enough in the sludge to ever swim out of the bay, they probably died from the shock of clean water.
Recognizing what an immense recreational and commercial resource a clean Hilo Bay would become, local and federal authorities are looking at ways to speed up the bay's recovery.
The county, working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, approved $250,000 to build a computer model for improving circulation in Hilo Bay.
Old-timers recall that water quality seemed to improve for years after the 1946 tsunami left holes in the breakwater for pollutants to escape.
But there's no guarantee that such improvements could be achieved at an affordable cost — altering the breakwater could cost a daunting $50 million or more — or that it would do any real good in the long run.
While we await the verdict, we can only remember Hilo Bay as a heartbreaking lesson that the effects of thoughtless pollution anywhere can persist for a very long time after we wise up.
David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.
