Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. representatives have said it will be depriving its final sugarcane crop of water during the latter half of this year. So what’s happening to all of the tens of millions of gallons of water normally diverted by East Maui Irrigation Co. (EMI) to feed HC&S’s fields? Is it being wasted?
While that is difficult to know without actual measurements, a chart provided to the Commission on Water Resource Management on June 15 by attorney David Schulmeister suggests that for more than a dozen of the streams that feed the EMI system, the company has fully opened or removed sluice gates along some of the ditches and in some cases also closed stream intake gates.
Dozens of streams feed into EMI’s ditch system and the Water Commission is in the midst of a contested case hearing to determine the interim instream flow standards of about two dozen of them. Alexander & Baldwin, EMI’s and HC&S’s parent company, has committed to permanently restoring several of those that are most important to East Maui residents for agricultural, domestic, and cultural uses.
The non-profit group Maui Tomorrow, which is a party to the contested case, has suggested that merely opening a sluice gate may be insufficient when the gate is too narrow to allow peak stream flows to pass through, and EMI does plan to further modify a number of its diversions once it receives all necessary regulatory approvals.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 27, Number 2 August 2016
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