Join host Sherry Bracken for a bonus episode of Island Conversations, featuring an enlightening discussion with water management expert Dr. Rick Bennett. The conversation delves into the history and current state of wastewater management on the Big Island, highlighting the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant as a significant source of pollution. Dr. Bennett also discusses the importance of innovative solutions and the potential for significant improvements under the newly appointed Director of Environmental Management, Ramzi Mansour.
Speaker 03:
Welcome to Island Conversations with Sherry Bracken, where we talk about issues facing our big island community. Island Conversations. Listen anytime online at kwxx.com. Island Conversations, brought to you by Parker School and by KTA Superstores, where you're someone special every day since 1916. Now, here's your host and producer, Sherry Bracken.
Speaker 01:
Aloha. Welcome to a bonus podcast of Island Conversations. Today's conversation, which is only a podcast and not going to be on the radio on the Big Island of Hawaii, is with Dr. Rick Bennett. And it's all about wastewater on the Big Island of Hawaii. I wanted to talk with Dr. Bennett, whose focus is water, about the wastewater treatment plants on the island after the new mayor of the Big Island of Hawaii, Mitch Roth, announced that he had appointed a man named Ramzi Mansour as the director of environmental management. Mr. Mansour used to work in the city and county of Honolulu. And one of the big complaints on the island, particularly for Mr. Bennett and others, is that the wastewater situation on the island was not being well handled by the county. Mayor Roth mentioned that he had consulted with Dr. Bennett before hiring Ramzi Mansour. So I wanted to talk with Dr. Bennett and see how he felt about this appointment and what he thinks needs to be done to improve the wastewater situation on the big island of Hawaii. Here's our conversation. Dr. Rick Bennett, for years you have been critical of Hawaii County's handling or really not handling the wastewater situation at the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant. In fact, on February 1, 2020, I read a very interesting piece you wrote on your h2ocona.org blog that the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant is the largest source of ocean pollutants on the Kona Coast. I'd like to know more about that. And also, we have a new head of the Department of Environmental Management coming in, somebody who I understand you approve of. And I'd just like to know how you assess the current situation and what you expect or hope to see going forward relative to the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Speaker 04:
Yeah, a little history. In my career with the university, when we were dealing with pollution issues in a receiving water, in this case it was Smallest Bay, California, which is a long, narrow estuary not more than 20 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. And it was heavily polluted when they decided to cut down all the redwood trees to build San Francisco. And then while the tree is gone, it became an opportunity for grazing agriculture, and specifically dairy. And as bacteria count, this time we're talking about fecal coliforms, the predecessor of an Israel cocci, would go up and down with rainy bends. And everybody wanted to say, well, it's seagulls, it's sea lions. Nobody wanted to say, you know, there's a lot, a lot of cows in the watershed. And so what I did is I did an inventory of all the cattle in the watershed. And we estimated how many sea lions are in the bay at any one time. It's less than 20 seagulls, you know, several hundred. but cows in the thousands, and a mature dairy cow will produce 125 pounds of manure each and every day. And the fecal bacteria counts are in the hundreds of millions per pound. And so given that kind of loading, even if only 1% of the cow manure is actually flowing into the bay in the various winter streams, it causes significant counts, and these high counts, shut down the oyster industry that's in that bay because of a potential health risk. And so it made sense to me to count where the biggest sources are. And we did the same thing for nitrogen and phosphorus. I got my first collaboration with the University of Hawaii when Dr. Stephen Smith had a project to look at land-ocean interfaces, and Smallest Bay was his study area, so Steve and I also did, a nutrient balance for the watershed. And we discovered that between people and cows, they're kind of equal in their contribution of nutrients, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, to the watershed.
Speaker 01:
Dr. Rick, you talked about the Tamales Bay watershed. I'm curious. Well, first of all, I think for listeners who don't really use that term very often, what exactly is a watershed?
Speaker 04:
Okay, a watershed is defined by the outer boundary. Now you're on the land. The outer boundary that slopes inward to a series of drainages. So that's oftentimes a ridgeline or a mountain peak. On the other side of the mountain would be in a different watershed. And so imagine that it's raining hard up Mauka Kealakekua. And by virtue of the topography up there, the watershed is very narrow, but it's also very steep. And from time to time, so much water will fall within that upper watershed. It will race downhill at high velocity, tremendous volumes of water. But it never hits the ocean directly. The water will all disappear into the lava down on the flat there. It's not fallable. But the watershed is created by a geographical boundary that causes the water to flow into the watershed and not out into it.
Speaker 01:
So when you spoke of Tomales Bay and the watershed, and you were looking at all the cows in the watershed, any idea how many miles away from the water those cows were located that were part of the watershed?
Speaker 04:
In some cases, the cows had an ocean view. And in other cases, they were up a tributary watershed, and the winter streams had to carry the runoff for several miles before it went into the Tomales Bay watershed. Then as you went north in Sonoma County, you could get into a different watershed that drained into an estuary right at the Marin County, Sonoma County line called the Estero Americano. And so there was very obvious watersheds there. Here, it's a little hard to see our watersheds because we don't have any rivers or streams. All the water that falls in the coffee belt. I'm sitting here in the coffee belt as we speak. All that water, hundreds of millions of gallons a year, disappears after a rain. I get standing water for 30 seconds here. And where does it go? It goes down, down, down, and it hits the freshwater floating on the seawater in the cracks and crannies of all the rock on its way to the ocean. It is an underground river.
Speaker 01:
So for here on the island, basically anything from the top of the mountain might eventually flow to the ocean?
Speaker 04:
It will flow downward as it moves off the top of the mountain. It will hit sea level where freshwater floats on ocean water. And up Malka, we drill down 2,000 feet. That's where we find our drinking water. There's a freshwater limb that can be several hundred feet thick. But as you approach the coast, that freshwater limb gets thinner and thinner and thinner. By the time you're down to Queen Kahamandu Highway, there is no freshwater land. It's all just brackish. And that level in those test wells down there along the highway rise and falls with the tides. So it is distinctly hydrologically connected to the ocean.
Speaker 01:
Okay, thank you. I interrupted you. Keep going with your story from Tamales Bay.
Speaker 04:
So fast forward 20 years. I now, in Kona, I'm paying attention to what people are talking about, and I'm asking the question, where does our wastewater go? Well, we have a treatment plant for some people, but most people are on cesspools. I said, okay, the cesspools are widely distributed, kind of hard to get a handle on them. Let's start with the point sources, literally places you can point to, And I did an inventory of all the wastewater treatment plants on the Kona Coast. And there's quite a few, starting in Kehoe, working all the way up to Waikoloa. And a lot of these wastewater treatment plants do 100% recycling because they need the water for the golf courses. I thought, this is good.
Speaker 01:
Dr. Rick, you just said there were several treatment plants along the west side of the Big Island. I know about, and most everybody knows about, the Kealakehe Wastewater Treatment Plant. Where are these other treatment plants?
Speaker 04:
Well, as I mentioned, there's one down in Keahoe called the Kea'ea. It's a relatively small treatment plant. That water is all treated, and it's used to irrigate the Keahoe golf course.
Speaker 01:
So it's privately owned.
Speaker 04:
And they have contracted the operation of that wastewater plant to a company called Hawaii Water. And I look to Hawaii Water for some leadership because their business is wastewater treatment and freshwater delivery. And they have an interest in getting into the water reuse game. We just need to find a way to make that happen inside of Hawaii's labor and legal structure. Up the coast, Airport has a wastewater treatment plant. They reuse all of their reclaimed water. And then from there, you skip to a treatment plant at Hualalai. I think they're on injection wells. You keep going up to Waikoloa. There's a wastewater treatment plant on the Malka side of the highway, and they bring the reclaimed water back across the highway, and they irrigate all the golf courses there. In Mauna Kea, there's some reuse going on there. Mauna Lani, they're not. We're encouraging them to reclaim their water so that they don't need to use their injection wells to dispose of the treated wastewater to the ground near the ocean. And then up further north, there may be some small ones in Kalaihai, although I'm not certain. I kind of doubt it. I'll be nothing I'm aware of. Onaka'a has a wastewater treatment plant. for a portion of the population up there, and that wastewater is discharged to injection wells relatively close to the coast. And then back down the other side, there's a couple of small wastewater treatment plants, Papakeo, another one that's escaping me, and then of course there's Hilo, which is a very old treatment plant, and they get a tremendous amount of surface water infiltrating in the leaky sewer systems. That plant needs to be upgraded significantly. And I don't think we're going to see many more, if any, large new treatment plants. They're just too expensive to build and to connect to miles and miles and miles of sewer pipe. What we will see are sub-regional treatment plants. If a developer wants to put in a subdivision with more than about 15 homes or has to be a treatment plant and they can build a package plant right there, And they can plumb that water back to the residences for landscape irrigation. And you've got a nicely balanced mini system. And I think that's the future of these mini treatment plants reclaiming water for the benefit of its local community.
Speaker 01:
And the treatment plants at places like Hualalai Resort and the Mauna Kea, I'm assuming those are privately owned?
Speaker 04:
Privately owned and oftentimes privately operated. So the facility is being managed and operated by a contractor.
Speaker 01:
Thank you.
Speaker 04:
And then when I turn my attention to the county... I found out that there are approximately one to two million gallons a day of partially treated wastewater was dumped into a hole in the ground not far from the Kona police station. And it's like, where does it go? It can't disappear. And then I learned about our hydrology. I now call it, as other hydrologists call it, it's a subterranean estuary. There's an estuary under our feet as we walk and drive along Queen Kahamana Highway. And this wastewater is dumped into the lava. It's exceedingly porous. It just flows right straight to groundwater. And the groundwater takes it to the lowest spot. The lowest spot happens to be the harbor. The harbor was put where it is because it was the lowest spot. And they needed to do the least amount of to build a harbor. So today, when we measure the groundwater flowing into the harbor, they're right there on the east wall by the restaurant, we can measure a lot of nitrogen and a lot of phosphorus. And it is highly likely that most of those nutrients are coming from the wastewater that's discharged today. six-tenths of a mile away into what we lovingly call the Kealakehe Sump.
Speaker 01:
And before we continue with our discussion with Dr. Rick Bennett, all about wastewater and how it's handled here on the island, and about the new Director of Environmental Management whose responsibility wastewater will be. and who, according to Dr. Bennett, seems to be the right person for the job. Let's hear from our sponsors. And as we do, I'd like to mention that KTA Superstores has been sponsoring me since I began in radio in 2004. And since this is my very final podcast since I'm retiring, thank you so much to KTA Superstores, to the whole Taniguchi Ohana, and to everybody who's part of KTA. And a big mahalo to our newest sponsor, Parker School.
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Speaker 01:
Before we continue, a thank you to you, the audience, for being with us for this, my very final podcast for New West Broadcasting, my final Island Conversations interview. I'm retiring as of today, January 31st. The Island Conversations interviews will continue to be up as podcasts. You may find Island Conversations wherever you get podcasts, and they're also at kwxx.com. My previous program, Island Issues for Lava 105 and Koa Country, you may find some of them as podcasts available as well. Thanks to the entire Ohana at Newest Broadcasting, it has been great. But we still have things to learn, and that's why we're going back now to our discussion with Dr. Rick Bennett. He is very positive about what the county can and apparently might be able to accomplish during this next administration. Dr. Bennett, I have a question. I believe the Department of Environmental Management has said in the past that they dispute that, that the water that's being dumped into the ground right by the Kona police station, which everybody can see if you take a look at it, I mean, it's not hidden, but they say they believe that source is not the source of contamination in the harbor. How do you respond to that?
Speaker 04:
Folks, water flows downhill. And if you put two million gallons of water into the groundwater, it's not going to go uphill. It's not going to go sideways. It's going to go downhill with all that subterranean water flow. And so it has to go into the ocean. There's no other logical explanation. It may not come out in one discrete conveyance. It may end up fanning out. through these myriads of lava tubes. But the fact of the matter is about 250 pounds of nitrogen, elemental nitrogen, flows into that harbor every day. And the waters along the coast there, right, especially at the mouth of the bay, are listed as impaired by the EPA for nitrogen, phosphorus, ammonia, and chlorophyll, which is an indicator of the algae that's growing there. Earlier in August this year, one of the members of the waterkeeper's team, who has a boat in the harbor, called me. He goes, Rick, the water is so green you can't even see down four feet, really. So we went out, took some samples, and yes, the chlorophyll numbers were sky high, the nitrogen was sky high, and there was an algal bloom. And eventually the algae will gobble up the nutrients and it will eat itself out of house and home and then die. And if the water is stagnant, not flowing, it will rob the oxygen and fish will die. But in the harbor, there is so much groundwater flowing through the harbor and out to sea that stagnant water just doesn't occur. But for 25 years, the wastewater disposal for most, not most of the cattle, but probably 30 to 40 percent of the residents there, their nutrients are being concentrated at the wastewater treatment plant. And the treatment plant has a hole in the ground, literally, into which it can dump its wastewater. And Mayor Kim told me years and years ago this was a priority. And then Billy Kenoy became mayor. He goes, this is not important. We're not doing about it. Mayor Kim comes back and he said, yeah, we really have to fix this. He hired Bill Kucharski to be the DEM director. And I immediately got with Bill and showed him everything I know about it. And he told me very clearly, we can do this, Rick. We can clean this up. We can improve the water quality to R1. We can reuse all of that water and not dump it anymore. And over the period of two years, it went from we can do that to, oh, we can't afford to do that. It's too complicated. There's this and there's that. Budget crunch comes along, and the mayor puts a hold on the project. Fortunately, I'd been approached by Mitch Roth when he was candidate, and we spent several hours talking about this. And he asked me and Rick Gaffney and Steve Holmes to be on a task force and make some recommendations about how we handle Calakehe, we went so far as to make recommendations about all the wastewater treatment plants on this island.
Speaker 01:
And just an interjection, Rick Gaffney, who's been a frequent guest of mine, used to own Pacific boats and yachts at Honokahao Harbor. He's very familiar with Hawaii's diverse marine ecosystems and waters and the wastewater impacts on Hawaii's marine environment, especially around Honokahao Harbor. He's consulted with a number of governments about water issues. And then Steve Holmes, who Dr. Rick Bennett mentioned, He used to be a council member in the city and county of Honolulu, and he was very involved with wastewater issues and environmental management issues on the island of Oahu. So Mayor Mitch Roth picked three very knowledgeable people to talk with about wastewater on our island. Let's get back to the conversation.
Speaker 04:
And the recommendation is simply we need to upgrade these plants. We need to take all that water and reuse it to the extent feasible. In Hilo, irrigation and reuse will be a little challenging because it's so wet. But at the Hona Ka'a, irrigation has potential. And certainly in Kona, the driest, hottest place on the Hawaiian Islands, we can use all of that water for irrigating agricultural crops, horticultural crops like sod and public parks. And we can go to zero discharge. And I believe that's the direction that Mayor Ross wants to go. And he asked Steve Holmes or Rick Gaffney and I if we would help him find a candidate. And fortunately, Steve, since he was a former council person and an aide to one of the mayors there, he knows a lot of those folks. Ramji Mansour, with an extensive pedigree in wastewater management, reclamation and reuse, was very interested. And so Mayor-elect Ross brought Ramsey over, discussed with him, and I got a call one day from Mitch Ross, and he goes, can you meet with Ramsey on Friday? And this was a Wednesday. And I said, I will make the time. And so I took Ramsey on a tour from Cahoe in the south, driving all along the coast, stopping at the harbor, stopping at the wastewater treatment plant, and going all the way up to Puyallup to talk about the issues. And I would describe these various roadblocks that have been thrown in our way by various people. He goes, oh, you can do this, you can do that. He said, I like to think outside the box, and I'm thinking more and more outside. This is our guy. So for the first time since the days of Barbara Bell, who was the DEM director under the first Kim administration, and since Bobby Jean Leadhead Todd, who was another one, I think during Kanoi and Kim, and then when Director Kucharski was appointed, I thought, well, he's an engineer, chemical engineer, and he's got international experience with big projects, but that can-do attitude just got whittled down. And we're no further along today with the wastewater treatment plant, which is the single largest pollutant discharge point on the island of Hawaii and its county government. And that doesn't make me happy because I was on the Environmental Management Commission for a number of years. I was the chair and I was unable to change it. But in the current administration, and given the uncertainties of climate change and the importance of water for our islands, I believe that we're on the road to turning Calakehe into a 100% reuse facility, and all of that water will get reused. How does this help? Every gallon of reclaimed water reuse is a gallon of groundwater that doesn't have to be pumped. Or it's a gallon of groundwater that they conserved for in-home, in-business purposes, like drinking. And having multiple qualities of water for different purposes makes sense when you're in a climate where water resources are in question and subject to great risk. All of our groundwater comes from rainwater. You have this deep thing the scientists found that's interesting. I don't think it has any practical application, but all that water at one time was rainwater, too.
Speaker 01:
You know, the big stumbling block, as you noted, in the past has been money. And I was extremely hopeful when I interviewed Mayor Roth after he was elected prior to the inauguration. And he talked about Ramzi Mansoor and the fact that you two had met and that you thought he was the right guy for the job, because, Dr. Rick, I know how engaged in all this you are. But The money issue is still going to exist. Any thoughts on that, even though I know this is not something that would be your responsibility?
Speaker 04:
I think there will be a tremendous opportunity with the Biden administration recognizing that the infrastructure in these United States is falling apart. Every wastewater treatment plant needs work. Every freshwater distribution system needs work. Highways need work. And so there is an opportunity here with this renewal of infrastructure to get that money like existed in the 1980s when the EPA would hand out $2 billion grants. The upgraded sewer system in the city of San Francisco and Los Angeles were $2 billion grants. We could fix our problem for a fraction of that. especially with some of this newer technology where you don't have to dig huge, deep, open trenches through the Pahoehoe. Ramzi Mansour said, no, he's just bringing a horizontal drill. You don't have to dig it all up. He goes, why don't you do that? I said, probably because there's no contractor on the island that has those kind of drills.
Speaker 01:
And maybe it's not the way things have been done in the past. I think you know Bill Walter. He used to be the president of Shipman Limited, and he talked about the fact that there are various wastewater technologies now that are not like they used to be, and that's what he wanted to use for a new subdivision that Shipman Limited was planning on having built over on the east side of the island. And he sort of had some of the comments that you did that we just need to think a little more creatively. We need to look at what's out there. And I'm really very encouraged to hear what you say. So, yay, this is exciting. I really am pleased.
Speaker 04:
The county has had this tradition of hiring traditional big engineering firms. But the designs... for Na'alehu and Pahala are very traditional wastewater treatment plants at huge expense. We can bring in a membrane bioreactor system, which is about the size of a 40-foot cargo container. And that's how they get them in there, on a flatbed, just like a container. Set it on the ground, hook up the plumbing, and in Pahala and in Na'alehu, these bioreactors will produce R1 water that can be used to irrigate food crops. And one of the things I advocated for down in Na'alehu was taking the reclaimed water and establishing breadfruit orchards to rebuild a commodity, an agricultural commodity on breadfruit and all the other things that it can become once it's produced. But you have to have R1 water. And if you go the traditional way, it's way too expensive. You do the membrane bioreactor system, it's very competitive. And at the same time, because of the cost savings, we can afford to bring sewer to everybody in central Mount Elihu and not just those on the gangsta school.
Speaker 01:
That's really positive. And, you know, there's some residents down there in Mount Elihu, Jerry Warren being one, who've really complained about the plans the county has had. So this sounds like a very positive development. Is there anything else you'd like to add about that, Dr. Rick Bennett?
Speaker 04:
Well, this technology can be applied in Pahala. The wastewater treatment plant in Hilo needs to be redone. The same technology can be used there. And if water has to be discharged into the bay, we can discharge water into Hilo Bay. That will not degrade the quality of the bay. And that bay needs help.
Speaker 01:
And that's what we want, is we want to be able to live on the island but not harm our natural resources. So I'm pretty encouraged now. Thank you so much for sharing your mana'o about this.
Speaker 04:
Well, it's my pleasure, and thank you for giving people an opportunity to learn. My view is the vitality of the ocean is our life, and we degrade it at our peril.
Speaker 01:
Good words of wisdom, Dr. Rick Bennett. Thank you so much. Aloha. Aloha. My pleasure. And if you're interested in learning more about water, Dr. Rick Bennett writes a blog that he calls H2O Kona. H2O is in water. The letter H, the numeral 2, the letter O. Kona.org. Thank you to our listeners for being with us for my very final Island Conversations podcast as I retire on Thursday, December 31st, 2020. It has been a blast hosting these interview programs. Since 2004, 16 years, I've posted more than 800 interviews, whether it was Island Issues, the name of my first program, or currently for the last couple of years, Island Conversations. I've learned something from every single one of those interviews, and I'm really grateful for that. And I sure hope that you, the listeners, have learned and enjoyed the interviews as well. So for the last time, this is Island Conversations. I'm Sherry Bracken. And until next time, please, let's all live and drive with aloha. A hui hou.
Speaker 03:
Thank you for listening to Island Conversations with Sherry Bracken. available anytime at kwxx.com. We welcome your feedback and suggestions at info at kwxx.com. Island Conversations with Sherry Bracken, brought to you by Parker School and by KTA Superstores, where you're someone special every day since 1916, and by New West Broadcasting.
