Weeks before the Kona low storms, Honolulu reported that it was canceling another long-stalled project to dredge a flood-prone North Shore stream.
The city owns the final stretch of a stream called Kaukonahua, and over the years, it had become clogged with islands of sediment and trees. The project was too expensive, the city said. Then the rains came in March, overwhelming the choked waterway and inundating nearby homes and farms.
Many residents just barely escaped as mud and water buried their homes and swept away their belongings. The disaster was likely preventable.
Since the early 2000s, the City and County of Honolulu has spent more than $450,000 on plans and designs to dredge Kaukonahua and an estuary it flows into. These plans followed years of studies that sought solutions to prevent recurring flooding.
The city has been told repeatedly — by experts, residents and lawmakers — that failing to clear the stream would lead to catastrophic flooding.
Yet in the last 20 years, it has done nothing, according to area residents and a review of budget records. Kaukonahua stands out among city-owned streams for the warnings that went unheeded and for the devastation that followed.
It was not the only derelict waterway. Across Oʻahu, from the Waiʻanae Coast to Windward O‘ahu, a paper trail of shelved studies on flood prevention, some going back three decades, preceded damaging floods.
Those reports predicted the location, intensity and damage from the floods with remarkable precision in part because nearly every location that flooded earlier this year had flooded before.
Such was the case with Kaukonahua, the subject of flood studies since at least 1980.
Unlike other parts of the North Shore, where land sales and agreements have obscured who is responsible for waterways and drainage ditches, the law here is clear: the city is responsible for its portion of Kaukonahua.
It’s that exact stretch that residents blame for flooding their homes.
Rafe Maldonado, who lives on the banks of the Kaukonahua Stream on Haona Street, said residents have been trying for decades to prod the city to clear the stream and remove those islands that grew bigger each rainy season. Year after year, town hall after town hall, they’ve heard officials give the same responses: We’ll look into it. We’ll take care of it. We’ll remove it.
“And nothing happened,†Maldonado said.
After the second Kona low in March, Maldonado’s driveway, where previous owners held community meetings to talk about stream maintenance, was caked with mud — the aftermath of a midnight flight from their homes through waist-high water.
On Oʻahu, the Honolulu Department of Facility Maintenance is in charge of stream maintenance in city-owned streams and ensuring that private landowners keep sections of streams near their properties clear of debris and vegetation. The department can levy fines against owners who don’t step up and bill them for the cost of cleanup efforts incurred by taxpayers.
The city hasn’t kept track of such violations and stream maintenance in the North Shore.
In early April, Civil Beat requested records related to stream maintenance at several streams across the North Shore and violation notices related to those streams. There were no records of violation notices for those streams. And while the city provided some records of maintenance for the Paukauila Stream near Haleʻiwa, it did not have records for the others, including Kaukonahua.
Civil Beat reached out to the facility maintenance department for an interview with Honolulu Chief Engineer Gene Albano regarding maintenance of Kaukonahua. A spokeswoman said he was unavailable.
In a written statement, Albano said there were difficulties in reaching certain areas, “and other limitations such as regulatory requirements.†He said the city is working to address the accumulation of debris and sediment in Kaukonahua Stream.
“Efforts remain ongoing, and strides have been made to maintain stream flow,†Albano said.
Those efforts are too late.
The floods destroyed a home in Otake Camp and . Other homes that are still standing .
“This isn’t just an act of God,†Maldonado said. “This level of damage should not have happened.â€
Overlapping Jurisdiction
There is no single entity that oversees streams and waterways in Hawaiʻi. By law, each county is responsible for the maintenance of streams. But in reality, that maintenance is often left to individual landowners and an alphabet soup of government agencies.
The patchwork of landowners responsible for Oʻahu’s streams has made comprehensive maintenance efforts difficult to coordinate.
Owners usually only clean their segment of a stream. That was the case with the state transportation department ahead of the storms in March, director En Sniffen told lawmakers in April.
“The weakness of that approach is, that’s my jurisdiction. Period,†he said, pointing at a picture of a state-owned bridge. “Nothing upstream. Nothing downstream.â€
There should be a more coordinated effort to clear waterways among government agencies and private landowners, he said. But eventually the state and counties should take responsibility for maintaining all of the rivers and streams.
“If we leave it to private interests to take care of,†he said, “I don’t think it’s going to get done.â€
Islands In The Stream
Satellite photos from 2002 show islands of grass already growing on deposits of dirt that settled into a city-owned portion of the stream just makai of Otake Camp. Since then, those islands grew and grew until late last year, when images show them entirely choking the stream.
In the early 2000s, the state considered widening the stream to help convey more water to the ocean. Prompted by flooding in Otake Camp, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources looked into constructing retention basins, dredging and widening the stream, and elevating nearby buildings, according to a report.
In 2002, the Army Corps of Engineers warned that the stream would continue to flood without more permanent flood control measures as well as regular dredging to clear out sediment and vegetation.
A year later, state lawmakers representing parts of the North Shore introduced a bill that would allocate up to $500,000 to conduct a for Haleʻiwa and Waialua.
“Flooding is the primary natural hazard that has inflicted extensive damage in the State of Hawaii,†the bill said. It died without ever getting a hearing.
The council allocated $100,000 for . The goal was to clear out the stream from the bridge near Otake Camp downstream to Kaiaka Bay. requesting more funds to actually start dredging the stream, then-Councilman Donovan Dela Cruz reiterated the warnings engineers and officials repeated for years: “If project is not implemented silt build-up will cause flooding.â€
But the money to start work never came.
In the meantime, contractor Oceanit Laboratories completed its reports under the 2008 drainage project.
Removing the island clogging the stream could help convey more stormwater to the ocean, according to the report. But, the report also recommended against dredging the stream if detention basins and other mitigation measures weren’t also implemented upstream.
In 2013, the city took up yet another design study at a cost of $350,000 to dredge the Kiʻikiʻi Stream, an estuary fed by Kaukonahua. The work began in September 2013 and was scheduled to end two years later.
According to the city’s most recent budget, that project is still in the design phase, meaning construction never started; the stream was never dredged. The city’s proposal indicated that work wasn’t set to start until at least 2029.
The document also indicated that the $350,000 allocated 12 years ago was spent even though the city determined that the dredging project is not feasible “due to high cost,†in January.
Cindy Cromwell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Design and Construction that oversaw the project, said that the contractor completed land, water quality and aquatic surveys, conducted sediment testing, and partially completed preliminary plans related to that project.
But the project ran into issues in dealing with private ownership of other portions of the stream and gaining access to private lands to stage heavy equipment to dredge the stream.
Instead, Cromwell said, the department allocated its remaining funds to “high priority emergency projects.â€
A Midnight Escape
Rafe Maldonado and his family moved into their homes on Haona Street five years ago. Previously, the group of single-story plantation camp homes belonged to the Tanaka family, employees of the sugar mill who regularly led community meetings out of their carport to talk about the lack of stream maintenance.
Each year, the islands in the stream near Maldonado’s house got larger and larger. Trees grew on them, and Maldonado estimates that just before the floods, water had just 8 feet to pass on his side of the stream, which should have otherwise been about 160 feet wide.
He watched the water levels closely, noticing that the water often wouldn’t return to a normal level after heavy rains. That thought kept him awake the night of March 19. So did his neighbor’s motion-activated light outside, which kept turning on and off. He thought they were in the backyard to see if the river was overflowing.
Then, his father was rousing him from bed. Water was already in their front yard, and Maldonado told his parents to grab their emergency bags. He waded through rising water to his daughter’s house, where water was already lapping at her front door. He pounded on the wall to wake her up, telling her to grab her important documents and her cat, and only to open the door once she was ready because the water would come rushing in.
By the time she left, the water had risen to the side steps of Maldonado’s Toyota Tacoma. He parked it up the street and went back for his parents to help them wade through the water with their bags over their heads.
Hours later at a shelter at Waialua High School, Maldonado recalled seeing Levi Rita driving a front loader with people in its front bucket and others hanging off the side. After dropping them off at the shelter, he went back for more stranded people.
Maldonado would later run into neighbors who escaped from their second-story home on surfboards. His family spent the next couple days bouncing around from a shelter at Leilehua High School to his daughter’s friend’s house in Wahiawa. Finally, on the drive home, as they turned onto Haona Street, Maldonado saw one of his neighbors walking up the street.
She was carrying a bag of golf clubs, all caked with mud. She was also muddy from head to toe. As the Maldonados stopped to say hi, she gave them a warning about what they were about to see.
“Whatever you imagined,†she said. “Imagine it 100 times worse.â€
Funding Falls Short Again
The City Council earlier this year was asked to fund flood control improvements for the entire Kaiaka Bay watershed, which includes Kaukonahua, thus allaying the concerns of some engineering studies that warned dredging only the lower portion of the stream would not solve flooding caused by issues upstream.
The council declined. Instead, it directed more than $16.5 million for flood control projects across Oʻahu. However, more than 80% of those funds will go toward designs and studies for future projects rather than work on actual improvements.
Council member Matt Weyer’s district includes the North Shore and windward OÊ»ahu, where some of the most damaging flooding occurred. He requested more than $55 million worth of funding for flood improvements in LÄÊ»ie, in the KoÊ»olaupoko district, and in the watershed that includes Kaukonahua, but none of those projects made it into the final budget.
Weyer, who has been , said he understands that many in the community are frustrated with how long many of these projects have dragged on for.
“My preference is for us to just go for it as quickly as possible,†he said. “Because it’s a life and safety issue.â€
Still, he’s glad his other budget requests to fund studies in those areas were approved – including $3 million for two flood control studies on the North Shore and in LÄÊ»ie. Such studies will give the city access to federal funds to help cover the costs of those projects.
Another request, setting aside $150,000 for the facility maintenance department to coordinate efforts around clearing waterways, did make it in.
Weyer said the idea is to take a more holistic approach to water management and look not only at streams that overflow, but also old drainage ditches that contributed to the floods and coordinate with the various government agencies and private landowners to manage stormwater.
As for Kaukonahua Stream, it’s finally been cleared. On a recent sunny day on the North Shore, excavators stood on the banks of the Kaukonahua Stream, digging up deposits of mud underwater. The islands of trees and grass were gone.
It’s part of a joint project between the city and the state to dredge the stream, just as all those reports and studies called for years ago.
But as was the case with the rescue efforts, work began with the community. In March, , as residents dug themselves out of the mud, it was volunteers in privately owned excavators that started the work of clearing the stream.
___
Reporter Caitlin Thompson contributed to this story.
___
This story was originally published by and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
