{"id":1360,"date":"2014-09-30T05:26:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T05:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teresadawson.wordpress.com\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2014-09-30T05:26:57","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T05:26:57","slug":"new-noteworthy-39","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/?p=1360","title":{"rendered":"New & Noteworthy"},"content":{"rendered":"
NEW & NOTEWORTHY<\/b><\/div>\n

Sewage Spill Settlement: <\/b>The state Department of Health, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the City and County of Honolulu have agreed on a plan to settle a lawsuit filed by the EPA and the state over the spill of nearly 50 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Ala Wai Canal, bordering Waikiki, in March 2006. The settlement calls for the city to inspect, report on, maintain and rebuild several critical force mains, with a strict timetable for compliance. As often occurs, the settlement occurred before the lawsuit was filed.<\/p>\n

Many of the actions that the city has agreed to do as part of the settlement are tasks it was supposed to do under a consent decree it entered into more than a decade ago, in response to a lawsuit brought by the EPA. When compliance bogged down, in 2004, three groups \u2013 Hawai`i\u2019s Thousand Friends, the Sierra Club Hawai`i Chapter, and Our Children\u2019s Earth Foundation \u2013 filed a new lawsuit, seeking to force the city to live up to the terms of the consent decree. Now, those same groups are seeking to intervene in the most recent lawsuit as well as pursuing their efforts to intervene in the 1995 lawsuit. A hearing on their motion to intervene in the most recent suit was to have been heard late last month.<\/p>\n

Over and above this, the city is fighting the EPA\u2019s push to require the city to upgrade to secondary treatment at its Honouliuli sewage treatment plant. A similar demand to upgrade the Sand Island plant is expected later in the year.<\/p>\n

New Zealanders to Track Pigs:<\/b> Do fences really keep feral ungulates out of protected areas? For decades, building and maintaining strategically placed fences have been key elements in natural resource management in Hawai`i. But until now, no one has ever tracked the isles\u2019 population of feral pigs with radio tags to see how they deal with the barriers intended to separate them from areas designated for protection.<\/p>\n

Prohunt, a New Zealand firm that specializes in invasive species control, is being tapped by The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i to tag and track the movement of feral pigs at Kahakuloa, in west Maui. On May 21, the Natural Area Reserves System Commission approved TNCH\u2019s request to conduct its ungulate monitoring project.<\/p>\n

Using collars and skin implants, TNCH and Prohunt plan to track five adult male pigs removed from inside the reserve and placed outside.<\/p>\n

Richard Hoeflinger, the hunters\u2019 representative on the NARS commission, expressed concern that the study would lead to the hiring of Prohunt to eradicate feral pigs, leaving local hunters out. TNCH senior scientist Sam Gon stated that in fenced TNCH reserves where there is a zero-tolerance policy toward pigs, Prohunt could be used.<\/p>\n

Hoeflinger argued that Prohunt\u2019s only advantage was that it was quicker and more efficient than using local hunters, and that it provided data.<\/p>\n

That was an understatement, Gon said. \u201cThe value of that data and the efficiency cannot be overstated. We\u2019re talking an order of magnitude difference in reaching management goals,\u201d he said, adding that ungulate removal by local hunters can take a decade, whereas Prohunt can do it less than a year.<\/p>\n

Despite Hoeflinger\u2019s opposition, the commission approved TNCH\u2019s request.<\/p>\n

Terrorism Threat Examined:<\/b> The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released for public comment a report that concludes there is little risk of a terrorist attack on the proposed Honolulu irradiator jeopardizing public health or the environment.<\/p>\n

The document is an appendix to the environmental assessment for the facility that the NRC published last year. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ordered the appendix on terrorist attacks, agreeing with contentions by Concerned Citizens of Honolulu, which opposes the irradiator, that the EA did not sufficiently address the issue.<\/p>\n

David Henkin, the attorney with Earthjustice who represents the group, criticized the appendix, saying it \u201cdoesn\u2019t do what it says it does.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s supposed to be some meat on the bones \u2013 something that gives people confidence that the NRC actually analyzed the potential of various events\u2026 Conclusory statements don\u2019t provide the disclosure of the process, the thinking process, the agency engaged in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A copy of the document is available at [url=http:\/\/www.nrc.gov\/materials.html]http:\/\/www.nrc.gov\/materials.html[\/url] Follow the link to \u201cPa`ina irradiator\u201d under Key Topics. Comments will be accepted through July 9.<\/p>\n

Volume 18, Number 1 July 2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW & NOTEWORTHY Sewage Spill Settlement: The state Department of Health, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and the City and County of Honolulu have agreed on a plan to settle a lawsuit filed by the EPA and the state over … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[151],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-june-2007"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}