KAILUA-KONA — Impacts to historic sites caused by construction along Queen Kaahumanu Highway were the result of a failure to account for right-turn lanes associated with the project.
Though those connections to side roads were included in the Hawaii Department of Transportation’s grading plan, they weren’t included in a project map that accompanied the “area of potential effect,” a term referring to the area in which the “character or use” of historic properties could be altered by construction projects, according to the department, HDOT.
Work on the project, which widens Queen Kaahumanu Highway between Kealakehe Parkway and Keahole Airport Road, broke ground in September 2015. It followed Phase 1, which widened the road from Henry Street to Kealakehe Parkway and finished in 2007.
Initially, HDOT announced in a press release that Phase 2 was expected to finish in September 2017 and cost about $90 million.
Work on the project though has since been delayed, with HDOT now saying it’ll take about 14 months longer than expected, pushing the expected completion date to November 2018.
Last month, the department said the halt in work was the result of breaches at two historical trails.
Two stretches of the Mamalahoa Trail — accounting for 92-feet on the 19th-century kerbstone horse trail — were breached by construction equipment and another 36 feet of the mauka-makai “Trail to the Sea” were breached during grading. That trail runs from the Kaloko Fishpond to Kohanaiki Homestead.
Both trails are listed on the State Inventory of Historic Places.
An investigation into those breaches led HDOT to notice that the area of potential effect created for the project “did not include all of the project’s connections to side roads,” according to an agency statement.
Those connections, said Shelly Kunishige at HDOT’s public affairs office, refer to channelized right-turn lanes, the lanes that branch off the roadway and curve to merge with a perpendicular road, allowing motorists to avoid hard right-turns.
While those connections were included in the grading plan, she said, they weren’t included in the project map that accompanied the area of potential effect.
Kunishige added that the sites that were breached “were not properly identified in the field.”
The final archaeological inventory survey for the report defined the area of potential effect as the highway’s right-of-way and “areas potentially affected by the proposed undertaking,” such as Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park.
The survey includes a series of maps outlining the construction and grading limits associated with the project. It also indicates the location of historic properties in the area, one of which is the Mamalahoa Trail.
The map depicts the construction and grading limits as an outline surrounding the proposed widening area of Queen Kaahumanu Highway. The map also shows an outline surrounding a roughly 950-foot stretch of Kealakehe Parkway that intersects the highway.
About 150 feet mauka of the highway, the map indicates, a stretch of the Mamalahoa Trail runs parallel, stopping just short of where it would intersect Kealakehe Parkway.
The trail then appears to pick back up again about 600 feet north of Honokohau Street before hitting the highway and resuming once again makai of the road immediately near the entrance to the Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park.
Kunishige previously said the two breaches at the trail were near the park entrance and near Kealakehe Road.
The Trail to the Sea, also identified as the “Road to the Sea Trail,” in a table of historic sites identified in the area, is located a little more than 150 feet north of Hina Lani street on the makai side of the highway.
The map doesn’t appear to anticipate any right-turn lanes branching off the highway at any of the side roads.
The department’s Highways Division Planning Office is currently coordinating a revised area of potential effect.
Kunishige said Thursday that they expect to submit the revised version to the State Historic Preservation Division this week.
She said the revised version can’t be released until it’s agreed upon by all parties.
Kunishige also said Thursday they didn’t have a revised cost estimate. But according to www.BuildQueenK.com, a site maintained by the contractor to provide updates on the project, the cost was estimated at “probably in the range of $100 million.” That estimate though was given with the caveat that the redesign is not yet complete.