Kaumana residents are worried that feral pig carcasses being dumped near a stream at Akolea Road are contaminating the water — though the state says the problem is being addressed and the public’s health is not at risk.
Neighbors say the dumping began more than a year ago. Resident Candance Pacheco said her two children were swimming in late-2015 near the one-lane, wooden Akolea Road bridge when they first saw a scattering of pig carcasses rotting in the stream below.
The scene was stomach-turning, Pacheco recalls: Carcasses were intact with meat, wrapped in trash bags and each, bizarrely missing a leg.
“It was horrible,” Pacheco said. “One day, my kids called me and said ‘We went up to the river and there are pigs in there.’ They mostly had their leg chopped off and were just thrown into the water. We were upset. It was just sad.”
Since then, neighbors say there have been dozens more pigs and the problem appears to be getting worse. Pacheo said she now sees “a pig every other week.”
Russell Quincho and Rina Pacheco, who live a couple of blocks away from the stream, said they’ve also seen dozens of dead pigs which seem to be appearing more frequently in the past two months. Residents say most carcasses are similarly wrapped in bags and missing a leg.
Candance Pacheco said she contacted police in January but was told she needs more evidence or information in order to identify the responsible party. She said she saw a black Toyota truck hovering near the stream one early morning that month which she believes could have been the pig dumper, but didn’t catch its license plate number and hasn’t seen the truck since.
She also posted videos of several decaying pigs to the Facebook group Big Island Thieves in January to warn others. The stream flows into a popular swimming hole at Chong Street, she said, and she and other residents are worried decaying pigs could be compromising the water quality.
Several other residents, who declined to provide their name, said they’ve also contacted state and local authorities during the past year but to little avail.
“We just want awareness that kids play in that river,” Candance Pacheco said. “Here we want our kids to stay off the streets and off drugs and here they’re playing outdoors and then (people are) dumping pigs. It’s like, they are taking that (opportunity to play outdoors) from the kids.”
Authorities told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald enforcing the situation and removing the pigs has been difficult because it’s been unclear where jurisdiction lies.
Public Works spokesman Barett Otani said the county thinks carcasses are mostly being discarded on private property. The county has right of way over the Akolea and Chong Street bridges but he said water in between is largely regulated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The swimming hole near Chong Street also is not a county authorized swim area, Otani said.
“It’s a different situation if it’s discarded on the road or bridge,” Otani said. “But when you dump in a stream, it’s going to flow through 10 or 15 properties.”
“It is illegal dumping at the root of it all,” he added. “The root of the problem is simple, now the way to enforce this is to catch them in the act.”
The DLNR said it received a resident complaint about the carcasses March 6 and an officer visited two days later. That officer also determined dumping was taking place “from private or county lands not under our jurisdiction,” DLNR spokeswoman Deborah Ward said in an email, and referred the complaint to the state Department of Health.
Upon investigation this past week, the DOH thinks there is no immediate public health risk, department spokeswoman Janice Okubo said. That determination is based on the DLNR officer’s report, which observed two pig carcasses from a distance during the March 8 visit, both located on private land, Okubo said, and carcasses could not be removed without “considerable risk to workers.”
Okubo said the department plans to send letters to the two landowners involved which “informs them of the situation so that they can work to prevent future incidents.” She said island-based DOH staff will continue to “periodically check” the stream.
“If it was a larger quantity (of carcasses) it could be an issue — so some type of industrial issue — but in reviewing the area and the situation for this particular incident (DOH staff) did not feel there was an imminent health risk,” Okubo said. “… If someone has evidence and photos and something that clearly identifies a responsible party then we could potentially look into what else we could do, but in these types of situations it’s really, really difficult to obtain that type of information.”
Email Kirsten Johnson at kjohnson@hawaiitribune-herald.com.