The possible link between effluent pumped into the Lahaina injection wells and blooms of algae off the coast has been discussed at length. Other suspected sources are drainage ditches and channelized streams, which carry runoff from agricultural fields and other areas into the nearshore area.
No one has yet to mention the possible contributions to coastal pollution that may be represented by sewage spills. And Maui County has had plenty of these.
The Big One
One of the largest spills is also one of the most recent: a spill of about a million gallons of sewage that occurred September 1-2, 1992. For about 14 hours — between 5 o’clock on the evening of the 1st, and 7 o’clock the next morning — untreated sewage spewed from Lahaina Wastewater Pump Station No. 4, near Mala Wharf, onto a vacant lot roughly 100 yards from the shore.
The county forwarded official notice of the spill to the Department of Health on September 3. In that notice, George Kaya, director of Public Works, attributed the spill on the failure of a temporary plug installed by a contractor hired to replace a valve in the station. Kaya stated that “bacteriological analyses are being conducted to determine if the overflow reached the ocean.”
The fate of the raw sewage was nowhere mentioned in the report to the Health Department or in the news release. According to Ron Riska, a county engineer, about 200,000 gallons were pumped into vacuum trucks and delivered to the Lahaina plant for treatment. The remainder — 760,000 gallons of sewage — simply “percolated” into the ground, although Riska was quite adamant in insisting that none of this contaminated nearshore waters.
A Litany of Disasters
On July 2, 13,625 gallons of raw sewage spilled from the Lahaina Pump Station No. 2. Some of this was removed by vacuum trucks, but the bulk of it — some 12,000 gallons — flowed into a lagoon at the Ka`anapali golf course. The internal write-up of that spill notes that the spill was reported to the county by the Lahaina police. When a county worker arrived on the scene, levels of hydrogen sulfide were “in excess of 230 parts per million in the space that he had to enter to gain access to and close the 20-inch valve in order to stop the leak.”
Within an hour of the county receiving notice of the spill, at least five county workers had arrived on the scene to assist, but it took them another 45 minutes to assemble the safety equipment needed — “oxygen, masks, escape bottles and safety lines.”
By 12:35 a.m. on July 3, slightly more than two hours since the county had been notified of the spill, the flow was stopped. The county estimated that at 100 gallons per minute, with the spill lasting 125 minutes, 12,500 gallons of wastewater flowed into the lagoon. That assumes, of course, that the spill did not begin until the moment it was reported.
In this case, too, the spill was attributed to the work of a contractor, who had improperly installed a 16” bypass line.
‘Unacceptable’ Rating
In January of this year, the county was notified that the Lahaina plant received an “unacceptable” rating from the Department of Health, following its annual operation and maintenance inspection for 1991. Inspectors found poorly working flowmeters: if the meters were to be believed, Lahaina’s flow had decreased by a third since 1989. They found that “attracting and retaining staff at the Lahaina plant has been a problem,” and reported that at the time of the inspection, four out of 15 positions were vacant.
The inspection report took note also of the fact that the Lahaina system was “involved in a massive wastewater spill in the area of the Ka`anapali Resort Development. On August 31, 1991, a failure of the 27-inch gravity line running from [pump station] No. 1 and No. 2 occurred. Another spill occurred as a result of the subsequent shutdown of [pump station] No. 2… This all led to sewage spilling out of one of the manholes. The spills totaled about 5.5 million gallons.”
Volume 3, Number 4 October 1992