KAILUA-KONA — The water crisis in North Kona objectively became a glass half empty situation Wednesday when the storage tank at the Honokohau Deep Well site dipped below 50 percent capacity.
Hawaii County subsequently issued a notice that cautioned non-compliance with mandatory water usage restrictions in the region would likely lead to service disruptions. Authorities have warned of this possibility since the saga began in January, stressing it more when the fifth of 13 North Kona wells went offline in mid-August.
The county upped the ante again Wednesday.
“Without everyone’s cooperation, there will be areas that will experience periodic loss of water service or lower water pressures,” a county release read.
The service area in question is largely mauka, stretching from Makalei Fire Station to slightly south of Palani Junction. It includes Makalei Estates, Palisades and Kaiminani Drive, as well as all of its side streets, to name a few.
Hawaii County Department of Water Supply monitors tanks in North Kona, checking levels twice daily. The Honokohau and QLT tanks service the area, but Honokohau is the department’s gauge.
Keith Okamoto, DWS manager and chief engineer, said the overflow height at Honokohau is between 15-20 feet. That’s the level at which the tank would typically top off under normal circumstances.
Those numbers change during a water shortage of this magnitude, but even under adjusted measurements, Okamoto said the trend his team has observed at Honokohau since Monday is troubling.
“When we’re doing well, it can get to about 12 feet. The last few days, we’ve been below 10 feet,” Okamoto said Thursday. “Every now and then, it will dip and then recover. But this one, over the last several days, has just been dropping and dropping without any bounce back.”
He added at the current rate of usage, the tank levels would be in danger of dropping to only a few feet by sometime next week. It’s at that point service would be disrupted in order to replenish water stores.
Repairs to deep wells at Hualalai and Palani are on track for completion by the weekend and early next week, respectively. Okamoto said the pump and motor, as well as some of the pipe, are already underground at Hualalai and installation at Palani was expected to begin as early as Thursday afternoon.
Other wells have been on the brink of return in the nine months since the county first enacted a mandatory 25 percent water usage restriction, only to be felled by faulty equipment or, in one case, a bad rig cable that sent a working pump and motor plummeting into the earth at Waiaha.
So, in the meantime, DWS employees are examining the potential for booster stations to push water from more southern wells in the North Kona region to the affected area.
That answers the question as to whether declining tank levels in one part of the system can impact water availability in another, but Okamoto said it’s not yet cause for concern. Boosters can only pump so much water per day, and the tanks in question have remained “quite full,” Okamoto explained.
Expanding booster capacity in case of a future rash of widespread deep well equipment failures is something the Water Board will examine once it initiates a system-wide audit, presumably in early October.
Causes and reactions
The Honokohau Deep Well service area is mostly residential and mostly mauka. That means there aren’t heavy agricultural or commercial draws on water stores and that customers experience a substantial amount of rain by Kona standards.
DWS hasn’t had a lot of time to analyze the cause of the tank level decline, but Okamoto said the most logical explanation is that a decrease in rainfall has led to more residential irrigation. He’s previously noted irrigation, both commercial and residential, tends to be the biggest strain on the water system.
His guess lined up with information provided Thursday by residents in the affected area.
“The last few weeks it’s been OK. We’ve had rain,” said Jeff Fear. “But it’s been dry all this week.”
Despite the weather, Earl Mavis said he was caught off guard by the news water availability was growing more scarce in his neighborhood.
“That kind of blows me away because I don’t see anybody over here using their sprinklers, and my sprinkler system is disabled for the backyard,” Mavis said. “It pisses me off more than anything.”
Burt Matsuyama — owner of Matsuyama Food Mart, one of the few businesses in the area — said he hadn’t heard the news of the DWS warning but that it was disconcerting. He said water disruptions would force him to close his kitchen and restrict access to public restrooms, adding it would hurt the business financially while inconveniencing the customers.
Fear admitted to doing some hand watering of plants Thursday despite the news from DWS, saying he had no choice because his plants would have died otherwise.
“They should have spare pumps for each well,” he said. “It’s a joke.”
Dennis and Evelyn Shimata also had some harsh words for DWS.
“The water department is passing the blame, turning the focus on the user,” Dennis said. “We changed our habits. They’re not changing theirs. We’re doing our jobs. They’re not doing theirs.”