Department of Water Supply officials are hoping to reopen the Hawaiian Ocean View Estates well fill station at noon today, after a three-week outage.
DWS spokeswoman Kanani Aton said a contractor removed the pump from the well, which broke down April 3, and replaced it with a spare motor and pump. The department was conducting performance and water quality tests Tuesday, and, if everything comes back all clear, officials planned to reopen the well sometime today.
Ocean View residents contacted West Hawaii Today this week with concerns about the well’s ongoing closure, noting the contractor doing the repairs had left as of Monday, but the well had not been reopened.
“It was really quite an expeditious repair,” Aton said Tuesday, noting original estimates for the work, had a spare pump not been located in state, could have lasted until late May.
Aton said the contractor had predicted the well could be in use again as early as the beginning of this week. The well was actually back on Sunday, she said, and the reservoir was nearly, although not completely, full as of Tuesday afternoon. The department is having the pump and motor analyzed to determine the exact cause of the breakdown.
This month’s breakdown was the second since the well opened last year.
Hawaiian Ocean View Estates residents spent more than a decade petitioning state and county officials for a well. In 2007, then-Gov. Linda Lingle released $6 million for the project to create a basic drinking water system including the well, storage tank, transmission pipeline and fill stations for the Ocean View community. The county broke ground in late 2007.
In the intervening years, DWS encountered unexpected voids in the ground where the well was being drilled, which needed to be filled. That slowed the process.
At the same time, Ocean View residents questioned plans for the storage reservoir and the number of spigots. Former county councilman Guy Enriques spearheaded efforts to change the specifications for the reservoir and get more spigots. Enriques’ efforts secured an increase in the reservoir size from 100,000 to 300,000 gallons, which was smaller than the original 500,000-gallon-tank DWS said it would build.
In 2010, the slow pace of completing the project led state legislators to investigate how the state funding was being spent. The Legislature’s investigative committee eventually found “major obstacles to the project have been resolved.”
The final obstacle involved problems with the compatibility of the well’s pump and the voltage serving the site.
