KAILUA-KONA — As North Kona approaches the one-year anniversary of its first mandatory water usage restriction, questions about how and why deep well equipment prematurely failed at several sites across the region remain unanswered.
Craig Takamine — chairman of the Hawaii County Water Board — said last week, however, that a measure of clarity is forthcoming. He couldn’t provide a precise timeline but said a group conducting a water system audit in North Kona should release its final report sometime early next year.
In the meantime, a few group members offered insight into the process, elaborating on likely recommendations and the data behind them.
A loose structure
Takamine announced plans to initiate the audit in late August, as five of North Kona’s 13 wells sat simultaneously inoperative and residents were told by the Hawaii County Department of Water Supply they must reduce usage to bare necessities only.
The Water Board subsequently assembled the North Kona Water Permitted Interaction Group to conduct the audit. The group comprises 12 members — two from DWS including Manager-Chief Engineer Keith Okamoto, four from the Water Board including Takamine, and six from the private sector.
Since that time, the group has met twice.
Jan War, chief operating officer at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority and one of the six private sector members asked to participate in the audit, said he attended the first meeting Oct. 2 at the DWS baseyard in Hilo. NELHA hosted a second meeting on Oct. 17.
It’s unclear if more meetings are coming. Takamine indicated the group may convene again, although not before the end of the year. War said he hasn’t been contacted about another session.
Takamine didn’t assign members specific tasks, instead asking everyone to conduct a big-picture examination.
Okamoto confirmed in an email to WHT that none of the group members requested or carried out site visits, although they were offered. It’s unclear how much they might have been gleaned from examining the topside of wells, some nearly 2,000 feet deep.
War said before the first meeting, DWS provided members with a comprehensive data set. Takamine described the meetings themselves as brainstorming sessions and open discussions in which members shared their thoughts on the crisis through the lenses of their own experiences.
But he added the group did not conduct deep dives into failure timelines, detailed causes of failures and whether certain manufacturers were associated with equipment failures at a higher rate than others.
“Because this is a volunteer group, we don’t really have the capacity to do that,” Takamine said. “That would have to be handled by a third party, and we haven’t even got that far yet. We didn’t want to make our report too technical.”
War referred to the meetings as “fairly productive,” but did say he would have preferred to see the details of the failures.
“In some cases, (failure reports) said ‘motor stopped running,’” War explained. “My question was, ‘Why?’”
Suggesting solutions
Despite only two meetings and some limitations on information, group members served up multiple recommendations.
DWS spokesperson Kaiulani Matsumoto wrote in an email to WHT Monday that the department has not yet made any decisions.
Precise technical causes of failures remain unclear, Matsumoto continued, but there is no evidence yet to connect problems between wells or to connect failures directly to equipment storage or production.
But one common thread has emerged. War said that “about 90 percent” of equipment failures occur with submersible motors. Matsumoto said it was related to motor cooling but that many factors could cause overheating.
Without understanding the precise nature of the failures, War was optimistic about the recommendations generated. Standardization of equipment was at the top of his list.
“Even within the wells that are of the same depth, you have different manufacturers’ motors or pumps,” he said. “Because of that non-standardization and the cost of those motors, they can’t stock spares. That was part of the problem.”
Standard equipment without the unique specs required by some North Kona deep wells in their current configuration could be built and stored at a manufacturing site, which was a second group recommendation. DWS would need to negotiate the cost of a maintenance testing program to accomplish this.
The manufacturer(s) could store the equipment, ensure its upkeep and cut down significantly on the lag time between a failure and a repair by immediately shipping finished parts.
“There also needs to be standardization of the monitoring equipment,” War added. “There is no supervisory control and data acquisition system that monitors the performance of these pumps and motors.”
DWS has not yet approached any manufacturers about these possibilities, so feasibility and cost of the strategy remain unknown.
Standardization would also likely require DWS to opt for lower capacity, lower horsepower wells, a third recommendation.
Such a move would create greater redundancy. Priority well sites would require a second well be drilled alongside the first. Instead of one 1,400 gallon-per-minute well, DWS would install two 700-gpm wells, which Okamoto said would cost more initially but would decrease frequency and cost of repairs.
The problem with the two-well strategy resides in availability. It’s unlikely both pumps would run simultaneously, so key wells would produce half what they do now.
When fully operational, DWS has the capacity to pump roughly three times the amount of water actually consumed in North Kona daily. Thus, War explained, the strategy might work at a few priority wells, but couldn’t be implemented universally.
“At this time, the department does not intend to convert any of the existing well sites from one to two wells,” Matsumoto wrote.
Finally, War said the county could help expedite the repair process by easing restrictions present in its procurement system. The process of extracting failed equipment takes days or weeks as it is, but just getting a rig capable of extraction to the site is a painfully slow process, he added.
“If they’re not contracting ahead of time, they have to go out to bid just for the pump rig company to come to the site, and that could take several months,” War explained. “Most of these repairs are six months to a year by the time they’re accomplished.”
War’s recommendation was to bid out contracts for a two- to three-year period, fix the price and make sure the contractors are available on island so that they’re at the repair site within days or weeks instead of months.