“The runoff we see every time is like tomato soup. The water in Phase 1 is white…Where does all that [red] water go?” asks Toby Rushforth. Rushforth is a member of the Kailua Bay Advisory Council and is skeptical of Ameron Hawai`i’s claims that its stormwater is pumped to catchment basins in Phase 1 of its Kapa`a quarry. He worries that the muddy water is escaping the quarry’s property and entering Kawai Nui marsh.
Although sedimentation is natural for all marshes, Kailua and Kane`ohe area residents, including Rushforth, have long been concerned that the Kapa`a quarry and nearby landfill and industrial park are sending excessive sediment and perhaps pollutants into the marsh. In 2000, the Kailua Neighborhood Board complained about runoff from the quarry, prompting the state Department of Health to fine Ameron $15,000 for illegal discharges from the Kapa`a quarry into Kapa`a Stream, one of three streams that feed the marsh. In addition to the fine, Ameron signed a consent decree requiring the company to comply with its discharge permit.
More recently, community complaints about runoff from the quarry have again spurred state agencies to investigate Ameron’s system to control stormwater on its property.
Last summer, members of the non-profit Kailua Bay Advisory Council, a Honolulu Advertiser reporter, and state Department of Health and Ameron representatives toured the quarry to inspect its stormwater management system. Over the years, Rushforth has photographed several incidents of what appeared to be illegal discharges from the quarry’s Phase 2 site located closest to Kawai Nui marsh.
Concerned about runoff events in early 2006, Ameron’s plans to ramp up excavations, and the pending renewal of Ameron’s National Pollution Discharge and Elimination System (NPDES) permit, KBAC had requested that the DOH hold a public hearing on the permit. Former KBAC chair Scott Derrickson says the council felt that information provided in Ameron’s permit application was insufficient. For example, he says, it was not being required to show sizes of the pumps being used to move stormwater around.
“We wanted someone with professional…expertise to state that the plan for moving water around during storm events was adequate,” he says. He says the state should not simply take the company’s word for it, especially since Ameron had violated its previous discharge permit. Under the permit issued, Ameron is prohibited from discharging any runoff from the site unless it meets certain water quality standards and is the result of a 10-year, 24-hour flood.
Instead of holding a public hearing, the DOH set up a tour of the quarry for KBAC members on July 18. Rushforth says he thought the group would visit Phase 2 of the operation, where he says he had earlier found and photographed evidence of what seemed to him illegal discharges.
“They took us to Phase 1, on the Kane`ohe side of the highway. We really needed to see the other side of the highway,” he says. When he told Ameron environmental health and safety manager Linda Goldstein that they wanted to see Phase 2, Rushforth says they were kept waiting at the quarry’s office for some 45 minutes before boarding 4-wheel drive vehicles. Upon approaching Phase 2, he says he saw a front end loader filling an old drainage cistern and pipe he had photographed earlier “as fast as they could move.”
In a July 26 email to KBAC member Maile Bay, Rusforth reported that Ameron was doing some “big time grading.”
“The net effect so far is that they now have the same problem they had five years ago. A two-inch rainfall in the Phase 2 valley will cause such severe erosion on the access road that Ameron will lose a day, maybe more, every time it happens.
“On the catchment basin [cistern] site and the five-foot pipe that carried water down to Kawai Nui, we know where it is and can dig it up any time folks are interested enough,” he wrote.
Despite Rushforth’s photographs of the cistern before and after the filling, the DOH was apparently not convinced of any wrongdoing by Ameron and felt that Ameron’s stormwater system was adequate. It issued the company a new NPDES permit on September 27. The DOH did not respond to Environment Hawai`i’s questions about the cistern or the NPDES permit by press time.
Shortly after the DOH issued Ameron’s new permit, Derrickson, on behalf of KBAC, expressed the council’s objections in a letter to Laurence Lau, DOH deputy director of environmental health. Derrickson noted that the only map provided by Ameron in its permit application, which he says was little better than a hand-drawn map, failed to show any water retention facility for Phase 2. The stormwater system must be able to handle a 10-year, 24-hour rainfall today, he wrote. What’s more, he noted that Ameron’s previous NPDES permit expired on March 31, 2005, which meant that the quarry was operating without a permit for 18 months. He added that the site tour was not a sufficient response to KBAC’s request for a public hearing.
While the DOH seemed satisfied with Ameron’s operation, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources wrote Ameron on December 8 requesting its own tour of the quarry. On January 10 this year, staff from the DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands and its Division of Aquatic Resources conducted an investigation of possible off-site impacts of Phase 2 operations on Kawai Nui marsh and a review of how the company’s stormwater management plan was being implemented. (Although the land is privately owned, the quarry, which is in the Conservation District, operates under a permit from the Board of Land and Natural Resources.) OCCL administrator Sam Lemmo, planner Michael Cain, and DAR administrator Dan Polhemus attended the January tour.
In an email to Lemmo written later that day, Polhemus stated that he believed Ameron was making a good faith effort to manage discharge. Still, he found two “points of vulnerability.”
A stormwater retention basin, which had overflowed and resulted in the $15,000 violation in 2000, was being expanded apparently in response to runoff events of February-March 2006, Polhemus wrote.
“[I]t is worth noting that although no single event in that series represented a 10-year flood, the aggregate effect of successive drenching rains created saturated conditions that by the end of March 2006 resulted in disproportionate runoff in relation to rainfall totals. In other words, by 31 March 2006 a two-inch rain ended up acting like a 10-inch rain in terms of runoff. I have heard back channel accounts to the effect that the Phase 2 drainage system was on the verge of being overwhelmed by those final runoff pulses, but that said, Ameron is clearly taking steps to try and fix this problem. I would note that the close proximity of the catch basin to the stream channel will continue to be problematic for Ameron…,” he wrote.
Polhemus was also concerned that Ameron appeared to be “winging it” with regard to a catch basin located below tailing piles in Phase 1. He noted that Ameron representatives did not give him a chance to inspect the basin and “got a little nervous in relation to the details related to it. The person I was riding with indicated to me that they did not think the basin would actually contain a 50-year flood because ‘we simply built what the area would allow us to grade,’ and because the catch basin picks up a lot of regular sedimentation from the eroding tailing piles upslope, thus requiring frequent excavation,” he wrote, adding that such a runoff containment strategy, which includes a catch basin that when full drains across the H-3 [freeway] and into Kapa`a Stream, “is probably not serving the public well. This is the only piece of Ameron’s current drainage containment system that really concerns me.”
He also noted that the NPDES permit, which prohibits most runoff into the stream, essentially results in the dewatering of upper Kapa`a Stream. His staff, he continued, feels that regular releases of clean water into the stream would be beneficial and more typical of the stream’s natural discharge pattern.
Polhemus added that Ameron and the state or federal transportation department clearly needed to address the periodic flooding of the H-3 highway resulting from inadequate or clogged culverts.
“Eventually, someone is going to get hurt or killed on that section of highway when they hydroplane into the ditch, and then it will be a matter of who gets sued,” Polhemus wrote.
“Finally, it is pretty obvious that some of the water quality issues in Kapa`a Stream originate in the current and former City and County landfills, and at the Kailua Industrial Park. Could be getting some oil and solvent runoff from the latter, given the nature of the operations there,” he wrote.
Whether or not pulsed releases of water should be allowed is up to the DOH. Still, Polhemus wrote that his staff planned to survey Kapa`a Stream “to see what the possibilities are for bringing it back from the dead.”
In a January 18 letter to Goldstein, Lemmo expressed his office’s concern about the quarry’s ability to handle significant storm runoff in Phase 1, recommended that Ameron raise the potential safety hazards at H-3 with the state or federal transportation department, and asked her to keep the OCCL informed if Ameron chose to approach the DOH about allowing periodic releases of water into Kapa`a Stream.
Goldstein says that Ameron does discharge water when it’s had a 10-inch rain and that the water is cleaner than what naturally flows in the stream. If it were allowed to release water periodically, “It would be an improvement in water quality…the solids settle out quite quickly” in the catch basins, she says. “It looks like drinking water.”
What’s more, she says that all stormwater must meet water quality standards before being discharged.
When it comes to releasing water into the stream, she says the company must balance the need to discharge against concerns from those who don’t want any water or even a grain of sediment from the quarry entering the stream.
Responding to some of the complaints leveled against the quarry, she says that there is a community misperception that anything that flows onto the highway or into the stream or marsh comes from Ameron. “We’re very careful about monitoring, about making sure things don’t come off our property,” she says.
Goldstein adds that Ameron budgeted $2.7 million to control water on the property for 2006-2007, and has already spent half that, mostly on large capital projects. As Phase 2 expands, Ameron enlarges its settlement ponds and increases pump sizes, she says. Because there isn’t enough room at Phase 2 to build enough catch basins to control all of the stormwater there, the company pumps water through underground pipes from the existing Phase 2 basin to Phase 1, which has several basins. The pipes have been placed underground to control erosion, she says.
With regard to Rushforth’s claims about the buried cistern, Goldstein says that Ameron has responded that it took a look at the site and couldn’t find anything that resembled what he was talking about.
“There aren’t any structures we created that look like what he was describing,” she says, adding that the DOH was diplomatic about the matter, saying it was a matter of interpretation.
And Rushforth admits, “If there’s going to be a case made, it can’t just be me.” If the community is not interested in pursing it, he isn’t either. If anybody cared about illegal runoff going into the marsh, they could easily find it, he says, adding, “It’s not up to me to beat the bushes on this issue.”
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 17, Number 9 March 2007
Leave a Reply