In the fall of 1991, Maui County initiated the steps needed to expand its Lahaina sewage treatment plant. It issued an environmental assessment (which determined that the project would yield no significant environmental impact). And it applied to the state Department of Health’s Safe Drinking Water Branch for permission to drill no fewer than six and no more than 12 new injection wells for effluent disposal, over and above the four wells already in use.
Things went swimmingly. There were no challenges to the environmental assessment and the Department of Health, on October 3, 1991, gave the county approval to construct the wells. All the county was required to do was notify the Health Department “within 24 hours of the commencement and completion of construction activities.”
Oh, and it had to “begin construction within 180 days from the date of this letter.” Otherwise, the county was informed by the state, “your approval to construct will be terminated.”
Six Months Later
For reasons not quite clear — delays in design work might have played a role — the county did not begin work on the wells within the window of opportunity opened by the Health Department. On April 14, 1992, William Wong, head of the Safe Drinking Water Branch of the state Department of Health, notified the county that because the department had not received any word from the county that it was moving forward on the wells, “the approval to construct the proposed injection wells has been terminated.”
Two weeks later, Maui County reapplied for permission to drill the wells. On May 15, 1992, Wong responded with a denial — and an explanation.
“As you are aware, the serious environmental issue of the algae bloom … has brought attention to the effluent injection practices,” Wong wrote. “We are deferring action for an approval to construct the proposed injection wells until the algae investigation is completed. Please be aware that if the algae problem is attributed to the operation of the injection wells, a critical issue will focus over the compliance requirements of the [federal] Clean Water Act.”
What a difference six months had made.
Pea Soup
Starting in 1989, blooms of algae had fouled Maui’s coasts, seeming to hit the coast of west Maui with special virulence. The chief culprit was identified as a species of Cladophora, a green alga. Farther up the coast, the red alga Hypnea musciformus — a species introduced into Kaneohe Bay in the 1970s — clogged the seas and fouled the beaches. In Kahului Bay, growths of yet a third type of algae — Ulva fasciata, or sea lettuce — were an almost perennial problem.
In 1991, people living along the coast of west Maui began to worry that the algae blooms might not be a transient phenomenon but instead might bring about a long-term, dramatic deterioration in the quality of coastal waters. A videotape made by two divers, Ursula and Peter Bennett, who annually vacation in Maui, contrasted underwater scenes shot in 1989 with footage of the same locations shot in 1991. The tape, which received attention from the press and the public, showed dying coral heads and disappearing schools of reef fish — all amid an at times nearly impenetrable film of green algae.
The Bennetts speculated that nutrients in runoff carried to sea by the Mahinahina Channel — a cement-lined stream — were feeding the algae. Toward the end of 1991, residents of the area were taking a fine-toothed comb to a U.S. Soil Conservation Service flood control plan for the Lahaina Watershed, demanding to know what impact the drainage channel called for in that plan would have on near-shore water quality. More than 200 people signed a petition opposing the project “if it is a threat to the coral reef ecosystem.”
A Link to the Wells?
In January 1992, the Department of Health established the Algae Task Force, whose charge it was to look into the possible causes of the algae blooms and recommend possible remedies. Membership was drawn from concerned residents, state and county officials, and experts from the scientific community.
At one of the earliest meetings of the task force in February, it turned its attention to the matter of the injection wells at the Lahaina treatment plant.
The Maui News of February 14, 1992, quoted task force chairman William Magruder, a marine botanist with Bishop Museum, as saying, “We really don’t know where this stuff’s going.” Despite the wastewater quality exceeding standards for secondary treatment, the effluent put into the wells remains full of nutrients. While few would challenge the notion that the effluent eventually ends up in the ocean, the specific mechanics of how it gets there, or what contributions it may make to changes in the natural ecology of the marine waters, are poorly understood.
During the 1992 legislative session, $100,000 was appropriated to the study of algae blooms. The state Department of Health has indicated it is awaiting the task force’s recommendations before determining how the funds should be appropriated. As of the end of September, the task force had prepared a draft set of recommendations, which reportedly call, among other things, for the county to be more aggressive in removing algae from beaches (and thus interrupt a likely stage in the reproductive cycle) and for specific studies on the impact of nutrients (from injection wells and other sources) on the marine environment.
As the task force continued its deliberations, suspicions of the roles played by the injection wells were growing. These concerns were ultimately what led the Department of Health to notify the county of the expiration of the 180-day period for construction of the new wells approved in October 1991. Under normal circumstances, the Health Department would not make a point of issuing such notice, Environment Hawai`i was told. But by the time the authority to construct expired, the task force had so increased the ante — involving the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the Legislature, and the print and broadcast media as well — that the Health Department really had little choice but to put the county’s request for more wells on hold.
‘Expert Opinion’
Maui County had not been anticipating the delay. The additional injection wells were part of a series of measures at the Lahaina plant intended to increase its capacity to the point where it could handle the wastewater generated by new growth — above all, the 4,800-unit community planned by the state Housing Finance and Development Corporation. In fact, the county had entered into a formal contract with HFDC, requiring the state agency to pay $12 million as its share of the sewage treatment plant improvement costs. (Total costs for the upgrade and expansion are estimated at about twice that, or $24 million.)
These concerns were listed in the county’s response to the Health Department’s rejection of the second application for the wells. In that response, dated June 8, 1992, Department of Public Works Director George Kaya told Bruce Anderson that the decision “will curtail the development of the state’s HFDC housing project … and other West Maui projects.” Kaya noted that the denial was inconsistent with the department’s approval issued back in October 1991. Moreover, he adds, “in the preparation of the Environmental Assessment for the expansion project, our consultant evaluated the potential impact of the injection wells on the coastal waters and they found that there would be no negative impact.”
The Environmental Assessment prepared for the Lahaina upgrade does address the matter of water quality. In the executive summary, it states: “In response to concerns raised about algal blooms off the coast of Lahaina, we consulted with several local water quality experts. Those consulted believe that the blooms are a natural occurrence and are not related to injection well effluent,” although none of the parties mentioned in the text had conducted studies to support their opinions.
The only data that are proffered to bolster the claims of the Environmental Assessment are found in Appendix C. But those data were gathered for a study of potential water quality impacts from chemicals used for golf courses. It was not specifically intended to determine the effects, if any, of effluent. The author of the study, Steve Dollar, states in his summary that “in the region downslope from the Lahaina Sewage Treatment Plant … no substantial nutrient or salinity gradients were encountered. As a result, it does not appear that effluent materials are leaching to groundwater and entering the ocean near the shoreline in the area surveyed.”
Caveats
Statements in the study proper indicate otherwise. For example, on page 7 of the study, Dollar writes: “Several patterns are immediately obvious when examining the data… First, the concentration of all nutrients (except dissolved organic phosphorus) is extremely high in the drainage flumes and channels, golf course ponds, and sewage effluent compared to all of the ocean samples. Conversely, salinity of the samples is low compared to oceanic values. It is therefore apparent that there are nonpoint inputs of nutrient materials from sources on land.” He goes on to say, however, that the nutrient concentrations present in samples taken downslope of the injection wells “were considerably lower … than at either of the other two sample areas” — those near golf courses.
Dollar concludes that “there are no indications from the data that nutrient subsidies are resulting in any alteration of biological community structure or function. Rather, data suggest that the materials reaching the ocean are rapidly mixed to background oceanic levels by physical mixing processes.” The statement seems clear and unequivocal — until one reads the caveat immediately following: First, the study was done in 1990, at a time when algae blooms were not present. Second, the sampling was done during times when rainfall and runoff were low. “A similar analytical program conducted during periods of high rainfall and runoff may result in substantially different results,” Dollar writes.
Wells, With Conditions?
Regardless of the Environmental Assessment, the Algae Task Force, the Department of Health and the EPA did not concede to the county its claim that the injection wells had no impact on water quality. In ongoing exchanges between the Department of Health and the EPA, the idea of requiring regulation of the wells under authority of the federal Clean Water Act was appearing with increasing frequency. (The Clean Water Act regulates discharges to the ocean by requiring polluters to obtain permits under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, which may be better known as NPDES permits.)
Over the summer, the state, the EPA, and the county struggled to arrive at a resolution of the matter. At one point, Mayor Lingle flew to San Francisco for talks with regional EPA officials. At other times, EPA and state officials went to the county for meetings.
At press time, it would appear as though the county will be receiving approval for drilling the new injection wells. The county’s main argument at this point seems to be that even without expanded service, the injection wells are needed to meet the requirements of state regulations. The wells now being used have such diminished capacity that they are barely able to handle average flows; for the county to have full back-up capacity (state rules require plants using injection wells to have the capacity to inject twice the anticipated peak flows), at least six new wells are necessary. But, according to the EPA, the county will apparently be required to demonstrate this need for back-up, not simply assert it.
This was spelled out in a letter August 20, 1992 from Harry Seraydarian, director of the water management division of EPA Region IX, to Council Member Patrick Kawano, chairman of the council’s Public Works Committee. “We agree with the state,” Seraydarian wrote, “that new wells would only be appropriate under the following conditions:
“1. The county commits to an enforceable reclamation schedule that will result in a decrease, from current levels, in the average daily and total annual flow to the injection wells.
“2. The county demonstrates through injectivity tests that one hundred percent backup capacity is not currently available, and that new wells would be necessary to provide reserve capacity.
“3. Records are submitted by the county demonstrating that a maintenance problem exists which would require construction of new injection wells in order to manage existing peak flows.
“4. The county has exhausted all alternative methods of managing peak flow such as using the existing plant reservoir to store peak flows and injecting stored effluent during low flow periods. It may be possible to achieve one hundred percent backup capacity in this manner without constructing new wells.
“5. A study of the potential link between wells and the near-shore waters is completed. If the study shows a hydrologic connection, the nutrient input to the injection wells will need to be reduced.”
Volume 3, Number 4 October 1992