Why spend all that money on cesspool fix?
It was interesting to read how the county might have to come up with $1 billion to pay for conversion to septic from cesspool, which is the estimate needed to address the conversion of 88,000 cesspools for all of the Big Island.
With that in mind, it is my understanding that GE makes a portable sewage treatment system which is the size of a container, can accommodate 1,500 rooms total, (for a resort complexes) and costs around $2.1 million. They have no smell, and have a track record for being used around beachfront property.
If we can assume that every room at any resort has one bathroom, and assume that we are dealing with typically two-bath, three-bedroom homes throughout the Big Island, also assuming one cesspool per home, that would mean 176,000 bathrooms throughout, divided by 1,500 bathrooms covered per container, times $2.1 million, which equals $246.4 million estimated to take care of all sewage treatment on the island.
That’s a far cry from the $1 billion price tag (or around 25 percent) originally estimated. The total price would be higher than this, as this does not include all the underground sewer lines needed, which would require digging through a lot of solid rock.
But the bigger question is, Bill Kucharski, director of the Hawaii County Department of environmental management, said: “a switch to septic systems would not be particularly better than the cesspool systems.”
So if it’s not really much better, why even consider spending the money on it?
Carl Merner
Holualoa
Ka’u reaction to SpinLaunch just
This is in response to Maria Schenkeir’s letter of April 19 concerning “Rude” Ka’u citizens at the Naalehu Community Center on April 14. It is also a reply to her backhanded dig at Maile David, our county councilperson.
There was a community gathering that day concerning SpinLaunch, Inc.: a for-profit company attempting to establish a launching site for a quite theoretical, very unproven and untested, centrifuge-catapult satellite propulsion system: here in Ka’u.
For some unknown, bizarre reason, the state Legislature, championed by Sen. Glenn Wakai of Oahu(!), has decided to try to issue $25 million in special purpose government bonds to finance a “corporation” which has: no scientific history; no prototype; no construction facility; plus, no credible, scientific backing.
Ka’u residents, when they learned that this company’s — plus State Sen. Wakai’s — first, preferred target area for their launching site was Pohue Bay (a most sacred, protected spot), showed up en masse to inform both this politician and these venture-capitalists that they were outraged that these two bills (House Bill 2559; Senate Bill 2703) were in their third(!) reading before Councilperson David was even made aware of the attempted passage of these cockamamie legislative deals.
Therefore, if these entities had given the community, plus our elected representative, any due-process notification and forewarning, they just might have had a different reception. If Pohue Bay is desecrated, it is gone! I am not kidding.
James Weisend
Ocean View