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 … Continued
Hi`ilawe and Hakalaoa falls, the legendary pair of nosebleed-high cascades in Waipi`o Valley, should be restored to full glory by the end of July, thanks to a sudden turnabout by Kamehameha Schools that caught the state Water Commission off guard. … Continued
Camille Kalama, an attorney with the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation (NHLC), didn’t say much after the state Commission on Water Resource Management voted unanimously and without discussion to deny her clients’ request for a contested case hearing. She toldEnvironment Hawai`i only … Continued
Deferrals are always anticlimactic, but there didn’t seem to be any way the state Commission on Water Resource Management could have amended the interim instream flow standards (IIFS) of 19 East Maui streams based on the voluminous, yet sorely insufficient, … Continued
After all the evidence and expert testimony presented during the Na Wai `Eha contested-case hearings in 2007 and 2008 on the minimum flows necessary to protect stream habitats and other instream values, which numbers did the state Commission on Water … Continued
If they dream – and who is to say they don’t? – Hawaiian gobies (o`opu) would certainly dream of free-flowing streams, of cool riffles and shaded, still pools. This, after all, is the habitat in which they evolved over millennia. … Continued
Earthjustice attorneys have sued the Maui Department of Water Supply over its acceptance of a final environmental impact statement (EIS) for a plant that would treat surface water collected from Central Maui streams and pipe it into the DWS system, … Continued
Leaving a few East Maui streams largely intact when Central Maui is wet, but robbing them of all but thin, sometimes disconnected, ribbons of water when it’s dry does not, in commissioner Lawrence Miike’s eyes, meet the state Commission … Continued
Former state Department of Health director Lawrence Miike, a physician and a lawyer, is the longest-serving member of the state Commission on Water Resource Management and was the lone dissenter in the commission’s recent decisions to amend the interim … Continued
Whether or not Castle & Cooke Resorts illegally used potable water to irrigate its Manele golf course is now moot, much to the relief of Castle & Cooke Resorts, LLC, and to the chagrin of the citizens’ group Lanaians for … Continued