 Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of likeable science here on think tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital, vibrant and interesting part of our lives. It shouldn't be thought of as being restricted to an ivory tower. It shouldn't be feared and talked about as if it were something distant and foreign. It's will is every day. It has real impacts on all of our lives. And here to talk about that with me today is Mike Foley, coastal engineer of motion. Welcome Mike. Thank you, Ethan. Good to be here. Hey, it's great. Great to have you here. Mike and I haven't had an interesting conversation already. Mike is a doctor here at UH Manoa studying artificial reefs that have been put in place and looking at how these have all these good effects on the coast. I guess maybe some bad ones, but how they provide habitat and shelter for creatures and they also can sort of break up I guess incoming waves and help shelter the areas in the end of them. And sounds like that must have been must have been a fun project. Oh, absolutely. And then for the last what roughly in nearly dozen years, you've been with ocean and working on all sorts of all sorts of coastal projects, private clients, government, everyone you can think of, right? Yeah, for the most part, well range, good range of projects. Yeah. So coastal engineering probably isn't really totally familiar to a lot of a lot of folks. All of our millions of viewers in Kansas probably don't think much about it. But coastal engineering is basically sort of taking care of the coast and making human engineers structures or changes to protect coasts, improve coast, repair damage to coasts, right? Yeah, for the most part, I mean coastal engineering is kind of the study of any sort of construction on the coast and how we do that in the most responsible manner, or maybe sometimes irresponsible depending on the engineer, but basically how we build, design, manmade infrastructure on the coastline. Right. And to a lot of extent, it's been sort of historically a sort of reactive science, right? Nobody cares about the coast until something bad happens to a part that you put something on, you built an airport on the coast and suddenly your runway is being undermined or you built a hotel there and suddenly its beach has disappeared, right? Yeah, I mean, for the most part, traditional coastal engineering, yeah, you call it the engineer when there's a problem, you know? And so, but I think things are starting to change. Right. Now, you were talking about how ocean it sort of tries to take a broader sort of systems view of it and looks at, it's not just looking at one little place where there may be a seawall that's falling apart, but looks at a whole stretch of beach from headland to headland as you put it and sort of tries to go, what's happened that whole system? How is it moving? What are the dynamics there? What really has to happen? You can't just fix that seawall expect and your real changes, right? Well, that's the thing, right? So it's more of a systems approach. It's more of a regional coastal resource management approach where you understand or you try to understand this complex dynamic system. And really, it's about developing, you know, collecting the data first and then analyzing this data in a focused manner to really understand what's going on in the system so that you can then predict what would happen next. So if you were to change things, how would that change the overall system, the overall beach? Would that make erosion worse in this area? Or would it would make things better? Could you get the beach to build back naturally, for instance? And once you can kind of model and do these predictions, then you can develop more comprehensive appropriate solutions. Right. And it's, I mean, it's an enormously complex field, right? Because there's sort of the topography of the island. But then there's all the topography that you can't see under the water, right? Sure, the symmetry. Yeah, yeah, the deep ocean currents that are driving things around the ridges, the valleys. Then on top of it, there are storms, maybe the occasional tidal wave just to throw it off tsunami, an ongoing background of rising sea levels, just to keep the whole business interesting. I mean, the amount of data you really need, if you want to try to be comprehensive in your data collection is enormous. It's baffling, right? And so it's a very complex system. Very every beach, while it's beautiful, is there's a lot going on every beach has a story to tell. And you know, we're just starting to scratch the surface in terms of really writing that story or really reading the story, I should say, and understanding it. But yes, there's so much going on on the coastline. It's the interface between, you know, the ocean, and what's solid the land. And it's really this place where this balance, this equilibrium happens every day. I mean, that's what a beach is. It's basically this equilibrium, this balance that's just able to deposit these fine little sediments and keep them there. And it's an amazing thing. And then to think how fragile it is, you know, one one storm can wash that all away. One tidal wave can push that whole beach inland. So yeah, right, anyone who's lived near a beach knows stories of suddenly after a big storm, you find stuff under the beach you never knew was there or stuff that has been there for years suddenly is now gone and you never see it again. Right? Yeah, it's really stunning how how much how what a dynamic system that they are. And this new view of trying to sort of do systems oriented sort of almost predictive coastal engineering, that really now calls on you to use new tools, right? Exactly, right. So what we're doing now is, you know, as technology, company, you know, developing ideas, basically, how do we, you know, use technologies, new, new developments, because of this amazing boom in technology we're having at the moment, how do we use these tools, you know, developed in the computer field, for instance, or even like artificial intelligence, you know, how do we take that kind of tool and apply that to understanding these these complex systems, you know, maybe that's what it takes is big data, you know, massive amounts of data and processing that in a way. Right, hooking together data sets that were never hooked together before. So you've got tidal data sets, you've got great data on tides on any given beach, right? That's all pretty well established. You've got a historical weather data of the storms that hit, right? You've got but these often these kinds of data have not been sort of drawn together and sort of looked at. And now I know you have a system I think we'll get to it a little bit where you can actually mount a camera on a beach and have it I just shoot or in time lapse fashion and watch the beach change from hour to hour from day to day from week to week. And so you when you begin to combine that kind of data now with these other data sets, you begin to get a real much richer view of the system, right? Exactly. Exactly. And that's that's what we're that's what we're aiming to do. So exactly like you said, if we can basically monitor the beach on a day to day basis on a minute to a second to second basis and really understand these finite changes, you know, at this at this really fine scale, in terms of time, but also space, if we can have, you know, multiple cameras along a stretch of coastline, and really get this picture of, you know, how does this side of the beach change, but maybe this, you know, as this side depletes, this side might grow. And so, and then you correlate that with, you know, tidal events, like, like a king tie, for instance, or, or hurricane event, or even just a Northwest big swell, or a Kona storm, what happens then? And if you can then sort of put that all together in this model of this particular beach, then you can form these predictions, and then you can develop these solutions. So if you see, you know, big Kona storm coming, well, what should be the, what should be our response? Should we plan ahead so that we don't lose this house, for instance? And it can be a solution that is temporary, that would then when that storm passes, we can restore the beach to its natural state, right? Right. And can you, for instance, look at something and say, Oh, we're gonna have particularly a bad El Nino year here. And therefore, we should take this kind of approach right now before that hits, and let the changing currents and all work with us here and help deposit more sand on this beach where we want it, rather than taking sand away when we don't want it to. Exactly. Yeah. But it's again, you're doing a lot of unknowns there, right? Right. And so I think, you know, at this point, it's, it's we can, we can do the best we can do right with the tools that we have. And the understanding, the traditional understanding of wave mechanics of ocean and graphics, just even just with the tools like our great, you know, wave buoys that we have around the islands, and then the great, you know, models that we have to predict wave forces. So, you know, we have a lot of tools currently don't get me wrong, but we're just trying to make it a little better, you know, trying to put this all together in a way that kind of saves us time too. So I mean, it takes a lot of time to look at all these data sources as, you know, the engineer and then put it all together in one place. For every beach on this island, I mean, that's, that's a lot of work, right? But if we can use kind of these new tools and technologies, then we can, we can really save a lot of our of our time and really then develop a bigger system, an overall system of the whole island, for instance. And that would be the goal. Yeah, it's sort of like what the folks at UH are doing at the EPSCOR project. And they're studying a couple of Hawaii's aquifers in great detail, trying to both model these, map them, figure out the real dynamics of these aquifers, how much water is flowing in, where, when, how much water is flowing out, where and when, how much water gets replaced each year, what seasons, with the hope of being able to take that and build a sort of predictive model they can apply to other aquifers around and really then, as you say, take a larger systems approach. Same kind of thing on a sort of a different level. Exactly. Should we take a look at the, the, you talked of just having your beach, your beach cam, I guess. Sure. Yeah, we can take a look at this. I think we have a video that maybe we can pop on. Wow. All right. Now that was cool. So how long, how long was that? It was, it was a minute here, but what period of time was being filmed there? I think that was about two weeks. So just taking a picture every 10 seconds, 20 seconds, something during daylight hours. Actually, that was every, every 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes, okay. Kind of really sped up into it. Oh, sure. Right, of course. But, you know, basically what we were looking at there was, was just the time lapse of this, of this beach. And when you, when you see that video go by, there's just so much information in there. So much that you get. I mean, for me to get that information, I would have to sit in a beach chair, you know, for two weeks, right? I mean, our life is tough. Yeah, but they're not going to pay you to do that, unfortunately. And, and so, yeah, I put this, you know, we, we put this camera up in this tree, and that was kind of a prototype we developed of this camera system that we've been working on, something where you can put it in the harsh environment, you know, strapped to a coconut tree, just, you know, in, in the salt air, in the, in the, in the rain, and then, of course, it has power and it's connected to the internet so we can get the data at real time. And then the key is then to use computer vision to use basically analytics that we can, we can then pull out the trends from that, from that video. So we were looking there at tides coming in and out. We were watching as the high tide mark on the beach shifted inland as kind of we had a high, you know, king tide event coming in, pushing, pushing debris upwards, you know, stuff that you don't see when you go to the beach just for an hour. But when you speed it all up like that, we're also looking at waves breaking on the reef and how the wave patterns changed, how the swells changed. We're looking at weather coming in different storms. We're also looking at people on the beach and how they were, you know, using the beach for different reasons. Yeah. We're gonna, we're gonna come back to this year. Right now we actually have to take a little break. You're with us here on Lakeable Science. I'm Ethan Allen, your host, Mike Foley from Ocean and Coastal Engineers with me today. Or we're talking about coastal engineering and we'll be back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha, welcome to Hawaii. This is Prince Dykes, your host of The Prince of Investing. Coming to you guys each and every Tuesday at 11 a.m., right here on Think Tech Hawaii. Don't forget to come by and check out some of the great information on stocks, investings, your money, all the other great stuff, and I'll be your host. See you Tuesday. You're back here with me, Ethan Allen here on Lakeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Mike Foley, coastal engineer at Oceanit. We've been talking about coastal engineering and the evolution of coastal engineering as a science, the new tools that are being used, new techniques that are being employed, why, how, where they're being employed. Just before the break, we were looking at a time-lapse video that covered about a two-week period, just watching one beach, watching what was happening, and you were talking a little bit about a few of the things that you watch. You watch, of course, the wave action. You watch the tides. You watch some of the changing weather. I guess you said this was just prior to the king tides coming in. So you were watching a city march of sort of the high, high line marching up the beach, right? Exactly. Day after day. And the trick, of course, is you don't want to have to sit there, even though that was a one minute and that covered two weeks. To do a lot of that, it's going to take a lot of your time to sort of sit there and try to record, well, this is happening now and this is happening now. What you, your ultimate goal is to get a smart system that can watch it for you, tell you sort of what's happening and say, hey, over these past three months, notice the high tide line has been changing in this way, on this part, and changing the other way on the other part of the beach, right? Exactly. Bingo. I mean, that's the goal. And, you know, for Mokalea, specifically, we're interested in erosion of that beach and how it correlates to these wave patterns and to these current patterns. This is a beach that is currently shrinking more or less. It's a beach that goes through seasonal changes and, yeah, there's times where there's no sand at certain parts of the beach and they have a problem with that. And then there's times when it's wide. And so, you know, it's about understanding those times, understanding why that is. And, of course, this is, you know, very important to all of us here on islands. Anyone on the coast, the mainland, of course, has the same concerns, right? Because coastal areas anywhere. Harbors, you don't want your harbors to silt up and fill up with sand and you need to keep the channels open to them. I gather you were talking before the show with me a little bit about the idea of putting a barrier outside of one of the harbors on Kauai. Actually, on Maui. Right. And so, that was my PhD dissertation was about basically building a large, what we call submerged breakwater structure for this harbor, Kahlua harbor, on the North Shore of Maui. And really, you know, kind of looking at a new technology, if you would, a new technique that engineers could at least study or evaluate as a potential option to, you know, on the North Shore, just like North Shore Mokolia and Oahu and the North Shore of Maui, we get these giant Northwest swells, right? The swells which make North Shore surfing famous in Hawaii, right? And while that's a great thing for surfers, it's also a challenge for any homeowner on the North Shore or especially any infrastructure. The vital infrastructure that is our harbors is crucial to our economy in Hawaii. And so, you know, when we look at protecting the operations in that harbor, the unloading and offloading of barges, for instance, if you have a big swell event, that can shut things down. And to basically resolve the issue, an engineer might build a giant emerging breakwater structure, which is the structure which goes out into the ocean. And, you know, it becomes an eyesore, but basically it works really well and that waves break on top of it and to smash into the thing and lose their energy. Right. And then the harboring site is tranquil. Well, you know, what if instead of being this thing that sticks out of the ocean, it's this thing which is underwater and it works just like our surfing reefs work, where it breaks away on top, creates maybe a surf site, but at the same time can create coral reef habitat. You know, it might be a dive site when the waves are small. And maybe we can do it in a way that's cheaper than these old methods. Right. But you've then again, you've got to look at what is that going to do sort of the local ecology, right? Of course. Something like that is going to change all the flow, the current around there. The wildlife lives in the area. Sharks might like it or they might not like it. Right. Well, so when we when we design it, you know, that kind of one of the new mindsets in coastal engineering, what is is taking this ecological engineering perspective, how do you learn from nature in terms of what makes a healthy coral reef ecosystem? What do these creatures like about a coral reef or what don't they like about a reef where there's nothing? Critical knowledge to have in particular as our coral reefs are facing huge challenges, right? If you if you can build, help build a good restructure that encourages corals to grow, that supports them. Right. Exactly. And if you're building a structure in the ocean environment, why not also include besides just, you know, the benefit to us, you know, as a society, but include the benefit to the environment? So include that ecological element, even if it costs a little bit more, but maybe it doesn't have to. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's probably ultimately these things will pay off in the long term. I mean, by building, taking extra time, extra energy, extra thought up front and building something that sort of fits ecologically helps, makes a better ecosystem. You will save yourself damage downstream that ultimately cost more, right? Yeah, there'll be external, you know, benefits that we get. Yeah, yeah, that's that's of course the aim of what you always want to try to do with these with these projects. Now, and more and more, I think engineering, not just coastal engineering, but I think all engineering fields are beginning to think a little more systemically in that sense, right? You're not just solving the local problem that sort of brought you there. You know, it's not just spanning a bridge across this river, but but it's considering, gee, we have transportation across this river. What's that going to do to the towns on either side of it? Lifestyles of farmers around there? Oh, sure. I mean, the way we wildlife, the way we dealt with stormwater, for instance, you know, we just kind of put in a channel and shot it out into the ocean. Well, that worked great for, you know, preventing floods, but it also didn't work great for ecology because of a lot of damage. And so now what we're looking at is changing, you know, changing the rule so that we have to deal with it on a more sustainable manner and a more property by property manager. Try not to just send so much just raw water out into the reefs. And that's an important part of protecting our reefs as well. Sure. Sure. We've got I mean, we've got such odd situations here in Hawaii, right? You've got at the top of Manoa Valley, you get 150 inches of rain per year. In Waikiki, you get 20 inches of rain per year. And all that rain washes down the one side and floods the alloy, dumps out on the reefs, buries the reef's sediment, brings all kinds of pollutants in there. And yet the Hawaiians who lived here didn't really have that problem. You know, they didn't channel the water practically, or they did channel the channel in very small ways. They had steps and ponds and catch, catchments as it were all along the way. So they didn't just rush down as one great gush of fresh water, right? Well, it seems to me that they had a much better understanding of the connectedness of the whole system. Right. And because they were so crucial to them to live off the land, but not only the land, but the ocean, and what it provided, I think they took a lot better care of it. So now we have to kind of go back to that knowledge of that connectivity and try to learn from the past and reestablish that. Yeah, exactly. That is very much a looking and seeing that it has been a lot of wisdom out in the world about how to handle these kinds, same kinds of challenges. They face them. And the Hawaiians weren't gathering a lot of water. They weren't drilling deep to pump fresh water out. And they were supporting the population essentially roughly what we have today. But they were doing by us taking a much gentler, but more finely tuned hand on what you do with the water that falls onto your island, right? It seems so. Yeah. And that's you know, it's not even just a question of engineering technology. It's a whole question of human attitude and instilling those values into people. So everyone comes to understand this needs to happen. This is a valuable good human endeavor, right? Well, yeah, I mean, so, you know, that's why coastal engineering, it's such an interesting field because here we are in the coastline, which is where, you know, the rivers come down, they bring the sediments a lot of times, or the waves will wash the sediments from the reef. And so here we are at this interface between society and the environment a lot of times. And it's it's the public resource. So it's the public good in Hawaii, you know, so it's so valuable also to our economies. I mean, the Waikiki beach is like a multi billion dollar beach in terms of its value to our state economy. And so it's about how do we manage all this? But at the same time, you know, so we want to manage the coastal resource, but at the same time, we have to be, we have to kind of look at the sustainability of our actions, right? And that includes not only the environmental impacts, but the economic impacts and then the social impacts. And so yeah, here we are at this, you know, very multidisciplinary, exciting profession that can be really challenging. Yeah, it's funny, I had Song Choi, associate dean of engineering on the show a while ago and asked him if there's one word to describe engineering, what would it be? And he said creativity. And I was sort of blown away. People don't think of engineering as being sort of a creative endeavor, but that's but talking with you is very helpful in seeing just why creativity is so important. You have to think very broadly about all these, all the connectivity to all the different systems, the human systems, the infrastructure systems, the natural systems, the underlying geological systems, hydrological systems, all these things. And your work as a coastal engineer is sitting, as you say, right at the interface there. Right. And, you know, some engineers can be really conservative, and they'll follow the manuals. And I mean, that's the way you have to follow the rules and the regulations, of course. But when there's a problem going on that hasn't happened before, when there's a new issue like sea level rise, for instance, and what is that going to mean? That throws a big twist in the whole mix, right? And so, you know, we have to be innovative and we have to think outside the box and be cutting edge because no one's written the manual for how to deal with sea level rise and we have to help guide that process. You know, if we don't do anything, we know that, yeah, why he is going to disappear in a matter of some decades, right? Or at least become a much wider place than it currently is in a matter of decades. Not if I can help it, right? But yeah, how do we do? I mean, the challenges are immense. So, in the last moment here, tell us if you would give some advice to today's college students, high school students who are growing up interested in this field. What do they do? What should they learn? What's going to make them good coastal engineers? Well, we definitely need, you know, people in the field, I think, definitely well-rounded students that are willing to take on challenges. You know, if you don't want a job where you have to think outside the box and don't be a coastal engineer, but yeah, so it's really about being multidiscipline. So you have to get a good understanding of the sciences, but also economy. You have to take economics. You have to take environmental science. The social sciences as well. I mean, this is all part of it. So kind of a liberal arts education, but at the same time, a real strong technical education. You really have to understand civil engineering, oceanography, coastal engineering. You have to have a real strong background in math and science. I love your note that you had written about. You also think it's great to go out and have an internship experience and try it out. See if they like it as a absolute. I mean, I think very important. I think that's most important is getting out there, you know, with a coastal engineering firm learning what it's like in the day to day by actually getting hands on experience and just being, you know, willing to try something, something new. Super. Well, thank you so much, Mike. It's been a great pleasure having you here. I as I always do, I've learned a tremendous amount here and I'm no audience has to. And so thank you so much and look forward to further conversations. Aloha.