Military should stand down on coastline drills
The following text was sent in a letter addressed to the Project Manager EV21-JZ in the military’s Engineering Command, Pacific.
Sir or Madam:
As you are hearing from nearly all of Kohala on the Big Island of Hawaii, the plan to conduct military exercises on the Kohala Coast is ill-advised and must be terminated. I am writing to add my voice to this dissent and urge you to take whatever action you can to terminate or modify the plan to conduct the many events planned for the Kohala Coast in 2019 and beyond.
I operate a commercial sailboat charter operation from Kawaihae Harbor and see this plan for military invasions as a threat to our business as well as our beautiful coastline. Further impact inland on road congestion and damage cannot be avoided by the military, and this in turn will negatively affect the tourism business so critical to our economy.
You are aware of course that this ocean area is a federally designated humpback whale sanctuary and that the heavy invasion of ships, planes, helicopters, and submarines into the environment cannot be tolerated in the sanctuary. The Kohala coastline above Kawaihae is pristine and any personnel exercises on coral, beaches, and rock cliffs will be permanently detrimental to the area. Pollution of all types cannot be avoided in these exercises. Local activities such as boating and fishing will be disrupted, with additional damage to fragile economic activities such as charter excursions on sail and fishing boats.
The environmental assessment you conducted must make you aware of these issues and therefore the hundreds of exercises proposed is outrageously contrary. I agree with others that it is crazy and irresponsible of the military to propose such a heavy load on our environment.
In this respect, the people of North and South Kohala all want the military to “stand down” from the plan to conduct these heavy-duty exercises in our beautiful front yard. There are other options open to the military planners, among them use of over 400,000 acres elsewhere on the Big Island. We all agree training is necessary, but you must not make the military’s bad reputation for environmental damage get any worse.
I hope you will heed the many loud and sincere objections and written dissent and public petitions being aimed at the misguided plan for these exercises, and call them off at once.
Carl Miller
Hawi
Family, friends should have guided boys better
I have been reading about the two guys who attacked the woman at the Old Kona Airport Park area. I think everyone is pointing the finger at the wrong parties. The only ones who are responsible for these boys and their actions are their parents and friends.
Teachers and administrators of a school only see these students for a period of the day which may be 45 minutes to an hour and the administrators don’t see them regularly at all unless they are brought to the office for an offense. In the office, usually it’s the counselors who deal with the troublemakers.
A wise counselor once told me when we had caught a student who was stealing wallets, “Where there is smoke there is fire.” The grandmother of this boy refused to believe that her grandson could do such a thing but we caught him right in the act. This was on Oahu many years ago but I still think the saying hold true, especially in this situation.
Colleen Miyose-Wallis
Kailua-Kona