For more than a decade, an illegal diversion has shut off water to Hakalaoa Falls, one half of a famed pair of cascades that plummet down a near vertical 1000-foot-high cliff at the back of Waipi`o Valley.
The diversion dates back to 1989. At that time, the soft weathered rock that formed the cliff face was peeled back in a landslide, exposing – and destroying – part of the manmade tunnel that for nearly a century carried water from streams further back in the valley to the Lower Hamakua Ditch system. That system had been used to irrigate fields along a 20-mile stretch of the Hamakua coast.
– Ed Sakoda, Water Commission
To make the ditch operational again, Hamakua Sugar Company erected a temporary bridge-like flume across the face of the cliff at the elevation of the tunnel, about a third of the way down. To protect the flume from falling boulders or heavy streams of water, Hamakua Sugar built the illegal diversion above the falls, which shunted the flows from Hakalaoa Stream into Hi`ilawe Stream.
Chris Rathbun of Waipi`o Valley brought the diversion to the attention of the state Commission on Water Resource Management in 1992 when he filed a formal complaint. Commission staff informed Hamakua Sugar it would need to apply for an after-the-fact permit to make the diversion legitimate. The application was filed, but soon thereafter, Hamakua Sugar went into bankruptcy, causing the processing of the permit to be suspended.
In 1994, most of the sugar company’s assets had been sold to Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate. The push by Rathbun and other Waipi`o Valley farmers to restore the twin falls then became tangled up in the competing demand from new farmers on former cane land to have the Lower Hamakua Ditch continue to provide irrigation water to their fields. Restoration of the falls had to take a back seat to the rebuilding of the tunnel. That project was in turn part of a larger, multi-million project to restore to health the entire Lower Hamakua Ditch, whose maintenance and repair had long been neglected by the failing Hamakua Sugar Company.
Obtaining state and federal funds to pay for the Lower Hamakua Ditch project was fraught with years of delay. Even after funds were in hand, carving a new tunnel in unexpectedly hard “blue rock” proved to be an engineering challenge for the company contracted to do the work, James W. Glover, Ltd.
In 1997, the commission found that a violation had occurred with Hamakua Sugar constructed the diversion above Hakaloa Falls and imposed a deadline of November 1, 1997, for Kamahemaha Schools and the DOA to come to a written agreement on land rights and submit a schedule and financing plan for repair of the Lower Hamakua Ditch. That deadline passed without compliance, prompting the Water commission to extend the deadline to June 1, 1998.
And so it went for the next four years, with deadline after deadline coming and going with no substantial progress. In 1998, the commission ordered removal of the illegal diversion by December 1, 1999. In 1999, that deadline was moved to August 30, 2000. In August 2000, it was pushed back to December 31, 2001.
On October 30, 2001, the Department of Agriculture asked for an extension of the deadline, based on the contractor’s estimated completion date of mid-March 2002. By the time the commission acted on that request – at the February 27 meeting – the estimated completion date was mid-June.
This time, the Department of Agriculture insists, the work will be done.
Overgrown Channel
Still, at the commission’s February meeting, some concerns were expressed about what would happen to stream flows once the diversions are removed. According to Ed Sakoda of the commission staff, the tunnel contractor “advises that heavy forestation and overgrowth has filled the river bed downstream of the diversion over the last 12 years and it’s questionable whether water flow will resume upon removal of the diversion. This is above the fallsÉ”
Brian Kau, who heads the Agricultural Resource Management Division of the DOA, which runs the Lower Hamakua Ditch, elaborated on that concern. “We went up to the diversion a little over a year ago,” he told the commission, and found it “heavily overgrown. Unfortunately, you can safely get personnel only a certain distance to the cliff face. I’m not sure you can get a crew far enough out to remove all growth and vegetationÉ. Unfortunately, nobody’s in a position to guarantee water will come over those falls again once the diversion is removedÉ It may be a little bit of time before it goes back over the falls.”
– Brian Kau, Department of Agriculture
But none of this had Rathbun worried. “When it rains hard, the stream will clear itself out,” he said. “It’s in a gulch. I don’t see how the water could avoid going over the falls.”
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 12, Number 10 April 2002
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