Pilau Ala Wai

Pilau Ala Wai Warning: Do not eat the fish

Kevin O'Leary

September 3, 2003 Honolulu Weekly

With the long-delayed dredging of the Ala Wai scheduled to be completed within weeks, the 75-year-old canal, which drains the area of urban Honolulu from Pauoa to Pa-lolo, may be poised to make a comeback of sorts. What the revitalization of the Ala Wai might look like, however, depends on who’s doing the looking. Local fishermen, canoe paddlers and environment groups see it their way, while hotel owners, the Hawai‘i Visitors and Convention Bureau and city and state government have their own plans for the manmade stream that helped to create the modern tourist industry in Hawai‘i. Sorting out these often conflicting visions will determine, to a large degree, the future of the Ala Wai.

Jumbo Shrimp Dan Mahnke, Superintendent for American Marine Corporation’s Ala Wai dredging project, has an aquarium in his company’s temporary trailer office at Magic Island. The aquarium has only one resident, a mantis shrimp, pulled from the canal during the operation. At around a foot long and weighing in at roughly a pound, the creature is impressive, even a little scary. “We’ve found five of these so far,” Mahnke explains, “and released all but one.” The one eaten by American Marine First Mate Keith Harvey — an act that made national news, primarily because the shrimp’s extraordinary size was linked to pollutants in the canal. Harvey doesn’t know what all the fuss was about. “We found three others that were bigger than this one [in the tank]. I heard they were good, so I wanted to try it. I let it flush out in fresh seawater for a week before I steamed it. It was really good — sweet.” The local dailies also ran the story, and although the creature’s size was featured (it was a record for mantis shrimp) most of The Honolulu Advertiser’s ink focused on how stupid it would be for anyone to eat anything that lives in a toxic soup like the Ala Wai. Both state and city agencies have put up warning signs along the 2-mile canal advising people not to eat fish or shellfish living there, due to urban runoff that has been found to contain potentially carcinogenic levels of termicides (such as Chlordane, banned for commercial use in the 1980s but still very much with us) and heavy metals from automobile tires and brake linings wearing down, and the resulting particles being flushed into storm drains. A professor of oceanography from UH, Eric De Carlo, was quoted in The Advertiser as saying that it is mostly first-generation immigrants, with poor English comprehension and therefore oblivious to the signs, who are fishing the Ala Wai and eating their catch. But on a recent Sunday afternoon near the Ala Wai Community Park, there is nary an immigrant in sight. Makai across the canal are the high rise apartments lining Ala Wai Boulevard, the edge of the concrete forest that is Waikïkï, the life blood of the state’s tourist industry. Rick (no last name given), born and raised in Honolulu, is patiently watching lines leading to three crab nets, placed in a brackish tributary of the combined Mänoa and Pälolo streams, a hundred yards from the Ala Wai. “The biggest Samoan Crab I wen catch around here,” Rick explains, “was under the McCully Bridge” (spanning the Ala Wai). “Was about 10 pounds, that one.” Does he eat the crabs he catches? “Of course. I put them in fresh water for a while, till they get rid of the mud through their gills. Sometimes I sell them in Chinatown. The Chinese guy tells me the local crab is sweet. Not like the ones they get from New Zealand — they taste like mud.” And he’s not alone in his pastime. “Plenty guys fish for crab, päpio, barracuda, mullet. We all eat them. Or give to friends. No problem.” Barbara Brooks toxicologist with the state Department of Health, however, does have a problem with people eating what they catch out of the Ala Wai. “Flushing them out with fresh or salt water will not work. The contamination — from organo-chlorine pesticides like Chlordane and Dieldrin — are bound up in the flesh and bones of the animals. Infrequent consumption would not pose a risk, but regular, long term consumption — over the course of a lifetime — would elevate a person’s risk for cancer.

Dredge drudge dreck American Marine’s Mahnke talks mostly about the engineering challenges involved in dredging a body of water like the Ala Wai. “It’s been tricky. We had the low overhead of the bridges and low depth of the water to contend with. Our barges — everything, really — had to be custom built or modified.” The dredging, which has been going on since August of last year, has thus far removed over 165,000 cubic tons of material (or, as the Honolulu Star-Bulletin pointed out, enough muck to cover a football field to a height of 94.5 feet). The mud has been dredged by a Caterpillar crane equipped with a clamshell shovel, which allows water to drain before the loads are dumped onto dump scows (barges). The barges have then been towed out to sea to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved site 3.8 miles off the reef runway, and dumped in water over a thousand feet deep.

Paddling carpet ‘We’ve pulled just about anything you can imagine out of the canal,” says Mahnke. “But the majority of the manmade material has been carpeting and automobile tires, which come from the canoe clubs. The carpeting has high levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. It shows that everyone who uses the canal has to pay attention to what ends up in there.” A walk along the bank of the canal at Ala Wai Park would seem to bear out Mahnke’s statement. The bottom of the canal for several hundred yards is piled high with what appears to be generations of household carpet, used to cushion the hulls of the canoes as they are taken in and out of the water. Michael Tongg, president of the O‘ahu Canoe Racing Association, explains that the City & County has provided the carpet, which over the years has ended up slipping into the water. “But I’m not in any way blaming the city for that problem — and I was unaware of the formaldehyde issue,” states Tongg. “We in the paddling community need to take care of it ourselves.” The effect of car tires and carpet may pale in comparison, however, with decades of pesticide use and littering that has occurred mauka of the canal. Traces of Chlordane, for example, the termicide of choice for decades before it was banned, have accumulated, primarily in the Kapahulu Avenue end of the canal, which has some of the deepest and most contaminated silt. “The Kapahulu end, which has never been dredged in the history of the canal, has been very good at trapping contaminants” says Karen Ah Mai of the Ala Wai Watershed Association. “Think of what the water quality would be like at Waikïkï beach without it,” she says. The association, which has received funds from the EPA, is working with other community groups to change the habits of people living upstream of the canal. “We hope to target specific neighborhoods with educational programs, to make sure people understand that urban streams and storm drains are not trash cans.” But a trash can is exactly what the Ala Wai continues to be, according to Ramsay Taum of the Hawai‘i Nature Center. “The canal is doing exactly what it was designed to do — control flooding and catch sediment,” says Taum. “That it is a trash can reflects what has been happening in Mänoa or St. Louis Heights or Tantalus for decades. People want to use a trash can for recreation, for subsistence, or as the city’s showcase, as our Potomac, our reflecting pool. But it can’t be all these things, not with what’s going into the system mauka.” Taum believes that until the multiple Ala Wai stakeholders can see the canal as part of an ahupua‘a, encompassing Makiki, Mänoa and Pälolo watersheds, the water quality will not improve. From an engineering point of view, however, a job is a job, and Mahnke is anxious to finish up his company’s contract with the state. “Actually, the remaining material is not contaminated to the extent people were lead to believe,” says Mahnke. “Of the 27 samples taken from the Kapahulu end of the canal, only two failed to meet the minimum requirement for ocean dumping.” Close was not good enough for the EPA, however, and the dredged material from the Kapahulu end will be handled differently by American Marine. “It will be mixed with concrete and dumped in a polymer-lined cell [a hole] at the reef runway,” Mahnke explains. Work on preparing the hole is nearly complete, according to Dickie Lee, of the Department of Land and Natural Resources. He says that all permits are now in order and dredging will resume “within a week or so.”

Who’s telling the truth? Commercial and government interests in Waikïkï have been involved with the Ala Wai since its inception, and remain intimately linked with every aspect of the waterway, including putting their own spin on the story of its birth. A surfboard-shaped informational marker on the Kaläkaua Avenue side of the Convention Center gives what could be considered the official line on the construction of the canal. Under an archival photo captioned “Chinese duck farm, circa 1910” the text reads: “The Ala Wai — ‘fresh water way’ in Hawaiian — was at the heart of the Waikïkï Reclamation Project launched in the early 1900s, ‘to reclaim an unsanitary and most unsightly portion of the city’ [quote not attributed]. The duck farms and millions of mosquitoes that stagnant ponds bred were the culprits. Residents complained, the Territorial Government responded, and work began in 1922. With the canal’s completion in 1928, the taro and rice fields, the fish and duck ponds, all had vanished. The reclaimed acres turned into house lots which eventually turned into apartments, stores, restaurants, and hotels — one of the world’s great destination areas.” “All of that is absolutely wrong,” says Barry Nakamura, assistant professor of history at Leeward Community College. “The Ala Wai project was a real estate scheme. Walter F. Dillingham, who owned the Hawaiian Dredging Company, and others in the Legislature, knew that if the very productive, highly developed agricultural land on both sides of the current canal could be drained and filled in, it would be worth a fortune.” According to Nakamura, the reclamation law passed by the Legislature at the time required that land owners in the area raise the level of their properties five feet above sea level. “Landowners, many of them Hawaiians, objected to the project — after all, their livelihoods were at stake. If a land owner did not comply with the law, the government seized the land and auctioned it off. Dillingham made money selling the spoils from the dredging, to be used as fill by those who could afford to buy it.” But what really bothers Nakamura about the sign on the Kaläkaua sidewalk is that it insults the Hawaiian culture. “The implication is that the Waikïkï area was unproductive, and that it took a bunch of white businessmen to change all that. The taro lo‘i, which had been largely converted to rice production, and the fishponds, were incredible engineering feats. The 800,000 original inhabitants of the islands were self-sufficient, thanks to such sophisticated technology. Today a numerically similar population has to import almost everything it consumes. In order to justify their real-estate scheme they have misrepresented the original culture.” Misrepresentation or not, Mayor Harris’ campaign to bring back “a Hawaiian sense of place” to Waikïkï has occupied a great deal of his time in office. Over the past several years the city has pursued Ala Wai improvements, along with the higher profile Waikïkï beach and Kapi‘olani Park facelifts. New landscaping, benches, ornate, turn-of-the-20th- century-style street lights, and bike paths (on the mauka side) have transformed the banks of the canal. Murray Towill of the Hawai‘i Hotel Association likes the changes. “There is of course an indirect economic side to this. If the improvements make the Ala Wai an attractive and inviting body of water it will enhance Waikïkï and the visitor experience.” Joggers and walkers interviewed along the route also praise the city for the improvements, particularly on the mauka side, where use is almost exclusively by residents.

Epilogue The sun sets, ending another day in the city. From the mauka side of the Ala Wai Waikïkï sits framed by the moat of brackish water that transformed a sleepy spit of sand and wetlands into a “destination” for millions of tourists, and put Honolulu on the map. At the moment it looks beautiful. “It’s a fixture,” says Ramsay Taum. “Those walls are on the historic registry — you can’t mess with them. It should be our gem, our jewel. But the various people talking about the Ala Wai tend to be talking about different things— we’re not climbing the same mountain, not headed toward the same place. Until we get enough critical mass around one belief — that it is a natural resource — we will remain in conflict.”

Kevin O’Leary is a longtime resident of Honolulu.