O'ahu sewer repairs thrown off-schedule by a massive Ala Wai Canal spill two years ago are getting back on track as the city commits more than $1 billion to upgrade thousands of miles of aging lines.

The 48-million-gallon spill in March 2006 led to a new set of priorities, including $300 million in repairs ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency.

With that work under way, the city is now turning its attention to the original fixes, which critics say must be completed quickly before another catastrophic failure occurs.

O'ahu residents will pay for the repairs through increased sewer fees. The fees jumped from an average of $41 a month in 2005, to $56.81 a month now, and are expected to rise to $79.10 a month by 2010.

Eric S. Takamura, director of the city's Environmental Services Department, said the city's focus now is on "urgent needs and investing in upgrades, technology and preventive maintenance that will be cost-effective and improve the performance of our sewer system over time."

The system is as vulnerable as ever, said Jeff Mikulina, director of the Sierra Club's Hawai'i chapter.

"(The system) is decrepit and it's failing. Every time it rains, we're rolling the dice," he said. "That's because of decades of neglect."

PROGRESS REPORTED

The system can affect water quality across the Island.

"We have concerns about the aging sewer lines and the integrity of the lines of the collection system," said Alec Wong, clean water branch chief for the state Department of Health. "When we have heavy storms, with the aging lines sometimes they have cracks and infiltration can occur."

The city said it is making progress, and reported earlier this spring that the 22 spills recorded in the first quarter of 2008 represent a decrease of more than 26 percent from the 30 spills that occurred during the same three months last year.

There was only one spill in March, the lowest monthly total on record in Honolulu, officials said.

Even before the Ala Wai spill, the city knew deteriorating sewer lines had to be fixed, Takamura said. But there was no money to do it because sewer fees had not been raised since 1993.

"When Mayor Hannemann took office in 2005, he immediately made the entire wastewater system one of his top priorities," Takamura said. "There was not adequate funding for mandated and other priority wastewater improvement projects."

In 2005, Hannemann proposed a six-year schedule of repairs financed by the increased sewer fees. He also allocated $241 million — then half of the city's construction budget — for sewer work.

Hannemann also doubled the city's wastewater improvement and repair program for fiscal year 2006, from $120 million to $240 million.

FEDERAL PRESSURE

In 2007, the annual sewer repair program increased to $355 million with another $351 million appropriated during the current fiscal year.

Even before the Ala Wai spill, the city was under pressure from the federal government to fix sewers. After the spill, the EPA ordered an additional $300 million in repairs to six force mains, or pressurized sewer lines. The city is in the midst of those repairs.

"There are a lot of challenges in managing a big sewer system. It's something that's being faced around the country with aging pipes. It's not a unique situation in Honolulu," said John Kemmerer, associate water division director for the EPA's Region 9, which includes Hawai'i, California, Arizona and Nevada. "Honolulu is relatively a new city but still the pipes are aging. The goal is to prevent spills and, in order to do that, it is important to have rigorous maintenance systems, repair aging pipes and consistently look up areas of the system that are vulnerable."

Complicating the process is the complexity of sewer work, which also is messy and disruptive to neighborhoods.

"We are experiencing mounting difficulty in trying to keep up with the exponential growth in project workload," said Russell Takara, deputy director of the city Department of Design and Construction.

"Working to repair underground pipes always presents a challenge to the designer and constructor," Takara said. "There are unknowns that are discovered during construction which cannot be wholly determined during design. These include highly variable ground conditions, unknown conflicting utility lines and structures, hazardous materials, historic and cultural artifacts."