 ThinkTecAway, civil engagement lives here. So often science is likable, and so often science helps us. Today we're going to study, from the point of view of the UHC Grand College program with Dolan Eversole, we're going to study how science can help us preserve the most valuable asset in the state, what I call the engine of our economy. Welcome to the show, Dolan. Thank you, Jay. Pleasure to be here. So tell us about your work at the UHC Grand College program. Sure, yeah, I serve as an extension agent for the University of Hawaii through a program called Sea Grant. Sea Grant's a national organization that's affiliated with NOAA. We're one of 33 Sea Grant programs in the nation. We happen to be the largest of the 33, with a fairly large extension network in all the Hawaiian islands, also includes American Samoa, Marshall Islands, and Micronesia. So I'm one of an army of extension agents, and what we do as extension agents is provide information to our stakeholders. In my case, my primary stakeholders are the businesses of Waikiki, so I do a lot of work in Waikiki on beach management. But we also extend that extension work to government officials, developers, really anybody that will listen to our messages. And who is involved in Waikiki, and who should listen to your message. That's right, yeah, there's a lot of decision makers, and I'm happy to say that more and more people are starting to pay closer attention to some of our messages of more cautioning of warning of climate change and things like that. But we try to be practical in our messaging and not wave our arms too much that the sky is falling and instead be, you know, pragmatic about what we're seeing. Yes, it's really an interesting spot to be in, this is the tipping point. You don't want to create panic, you don't want to create discomfort. You want to give a positive message. At the same time, you want to raise public awareness so people over time, anyway, develop an awareness of mindfulness about these issues. And these issues are derived largely from climate change, right? That's right, yeah. A lot of the policies that we're seeing develop now at both the state and the local county level. There's a lot of interest in developing new policies and actually examples of it happening related to climate change. And one of the big things that I've seen happen over the course of my career is we went from a paradigm, let's say, 10 years ago or more of having to defend the climate science. And we were very much in, from a university academic standpoint, having in a defensive posture trying to justify the science that it is credible. I think we've moved well beyond that now and there's a general, particularly at the government level, there's a acceptance of the climate science. Not in Washington, but here. Maybe not at the federal level. That's a whole other issue. But at least here in Hawaii, I like to think that we're a pretty progressive state here, particularly with things like climate change. For example, I can say the word sea level rise and it doesn't make people cringe. It's not the case everywhere. People are going to be blacked out in your written material. Yeah, the transcript's blacked out. But there are a number of efforts going on locally that are encouraging signs that our local elected officials, state elected officials are paying close attention to this and responding by creating new policies and laws related to climate change. Not just what to do in response to it, the adaptation side, but also the mitigation side on controlling our emissions and things like that. So let me ask you a question that I draw from what you just said. And that is, how concerned should we be? How much of a threat, an immediate threat is posed by these factors and processes and environmental changes? Yeah, that's a great question and something that I've had many discussions with my friends about over drinks and whatnot. And to me, it is this idea of climate change and the changing realities of the world that we live in is possibly the most pressing issue of our time. And certainly I would strongly argue the most pressing environmental issue of our time. And the reason I say that is there's overwhelming evidence that our climate is changing. And this is well beyond normal weather-related seasonal cycles of even anticipated changes like El Nino cycles. And we're seeing an ever-increasing change in our atmospheric conditions. The temperature is changing. And when you increase temperature both of the atmosphere, the land and the ocean simultaneously, you begin to see changes in weather phenomena. So for example, while we can't say that any single hurricane that we've seen over the last couple of years is directly attributed to climate change, the message is we're going to see a lot more intense and unusual phenomena like our El Nino winter of 2015. And that whole season, we had very unusual weather. So we're going to see more things like that. But one of the most pressing environmental concerns that I have related to climate change, most people think, oh, I know Dolan, he's a sea-level guy. And I very much am in that camp of paying close attention to water levels and sea level. But to me, the most pressing environmental issue is rainfall. And as we all… You mean storms or ordinary rainfall? Both. So the reason it's so important to me is, as an island state and communities that live on islands, we're heavily reliant on rainfall for our water. And if we have a change in rainfall, either too much or too little, that can dramatically impact our source of water. Well, why would too much dramatically negatively impact our source of water? Well, a great example. As of yesterday, we had a potential evacuation threat of the New Wanu Reservoir Dam, number one. Thankfully, they were able to pump the water levels down. It did not fail or even come close to it. But it's an example of what can happen when you get too much water too quickly is it can saturate the ground. It can create all kinds of landslides and problems like that. But it can also impact water quality, both in some of our drinking supplies, as well as maybe more importantly, to a coastal person like me. Our nearshore coastal waters are heavily impacted by these big storm events that tend to flush a lot of contaminants down to the shore. And the sea life, the animals in the sea are affected by that. Then it's just a trickle down problem where literally everything flows down into the ocean and eventually dissipates. But in the meantime, we have brownwater advisories and not the most ideal situation. And if it's short-lived, like, thankfully, Olivia passed through quickly. There were some damages, some brownwater advisories. But we fully expect that to be fairly well cleaned up in the next week or two. And we all move on. But the point I'm making is that we're going to see more and more frequent events like that. They're going to start to slowly chew away at our infrastructure. And some of our stormwater infrastructure is showing signs of its age already. If you have infrastructure that breaks, I mean, water infrastructure that breaks, I heard this in a piece on NPR yesterday. You have the risk of contamination into the water, and thus, water that's not potable, that is infiltrated with bacteria and the like. And so this is a big problem. When the pipes break, I didn't really know this. When the pipes break, you have a quality control question right away. Yeah, that's right. I'm not a water engineer, but I have just a little basic understanding of the process, which is consistent with what you just said, which is our water comes from underground aquifers. So they're more or less sealed. That's great. The amount of rainfall isn't necessarily going to impact the aquifer. It takes decades for that water to kind of eventually filter down. But our conveyance of that water from the aquifer goes through pipes and pumps. And if there's ever a break, which they are pretty frequent, now you have a potential contamination issue. And you could have things, for example, in low-lying areas where we have our infrastructure underground, and that groundwater table becomes too high and it starts to saturate our utilities, including groundwater, I should say, our water supply pipes. If there's cracks in the pipes, and there's positive pressure through the pipe, it's okay because the water's leaking out. But if the water pressure gets too low, then that groundwater can leak into our drinking water. And there's really no filter between that and your house. So those are problems that— And you could have pressure out, and then it could change. That's right. Pressure could drop. And now, instead of pushing out through the pipe, it pushes into the pipe, no? Yeah. That's a common problem with our sewer systems, especially because they are not generally what's called a forced main or a positive pressure. They're gravity-fed, and they do develop cracks over time. And then when it rains real hard, the groundwater or stormwater will leak into the sewer system and overwhelm it. So when you hear about sewer systems getting overwhelmed, it's typically through a million tiny little cracks seeping through. How does that work? That happened in Waikiki. Yeah. Well, that was maybe a bit different, where they had a catastrophic failure that kind of forced them to discharge into the All-Awaii Canal. Yeah, that was a bad time. That was not a good time. During Mufi Haname's administration, yeah. I think so. Yeah. So—and now he is the CEO of the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association, which is really a statement of the tourist industry in Hawaii, the engine of our economy. But I saw him last night at the—was at the tourism walking contest, and they were doing awards last night. It was very good. It was a—coming together of the industry and the people who support the industry and of the nonprofits around there. And I saw something that I don't always see. I saw the community of Waikiki, the community of the hotels, the community of the nonprofits, the community of people who work there and support it. It was interesting to see them all in one room. Anyway, so let's go to Waikiki for a minute. Sure. OK. Because Waikiki clearly is subject to erosion and—see the little change, the little rise, or whatever you call it, in a given place. And that has got to affect tourism, because people come here from all over the world seeking an expansive beach, don't they? Yeah, that's right. I think most people, if not everybody, would agree that Waikiki Beach serves as a critically important piece of infrastructure. If you could think of it as an asset or infrastructure to our economy. As a matter of fact, we did an economic study of Waikiki Beach. There was a study done in 2008. We just recently completed an update to this 2008 study through the University of Hawaii as one of our many initiatives to try to provide science to inform decision making in Waikiki. And the study suggests that Waikiki Beach generates about $2 billion a year to the local economy. That's $2 billion with a B. And so most people would agree, Waikiki Beach is invaluable. It's priceless. Now we actually have a number that we can assign to that. And it points to the need to maybe reinvest in some of the infrastructure around Waikiki as it relates to beach management. Some of the shoreline structures that literally hold together Waikiki Beach as we know it are beginning to show signs of their age and failing in some cases. And certainly many people would agree, or at least they may have seen, that there's been a slow, progressive erosion of many of the beaches in Waikiki. Not all of them, but most of them are in a state of erosion. And that's partly because if you look at the history of Waikiki Beach, it's not a natural beach to begin with. There were very small beaches in Waikiki prior to us interfering with them that were bisected by a number of streams that emptied into Waikiki. And we've completely altered that whole system. Sure. It was a swamp, wasn't it? It was a swampy island and so forth. And so when you have that, you don't have a big beach, you have little beaches. And I guess when they filled in Waikiki at some point, this must have been in the 20s or the 30s, I guess, when they were into that kind of dredging experience, at the time they built the Alawai canal, then you wind up bringing artificial sand, making artificial beaches. No. That's what happened. Yeah. That's fair to say. I think if we go back far enough, the dredging of the Alawai Canal in the 1920s created the fill that was used to develop Waikiki, as we know it. According to some of the documents I've read, the original intent was not to create a visitor destination, but to instead just create new land that's developable. It turned out that it was in an ideal location for the visitor industry because of its perpetual sunny skies and blue waters. So Waikiki evolved into what it is now. And I think it represents, Waikiki is not alone, but it represents one of the outstanding problems that we have here is unplanned communities, that the infrastructure wasn't really developed with the type of development that we have now. You mean what kind of infrastructure are we talking about? Streets, sewers, electricity, all of that. Streets are thrown together. A good part of it was called the jungle until recent times. That's right. So they never really, this sounds like caca-aco, I'm sorry to say. They never really put the infrastructure together on a planned basis. Right. It wasn't a planned community to be such a high density and important economic driver that it is now. So we're in this situation now, same thing with the beach. And we have a number of structures along the shoreline. We've done a lot of investigation, engineering, environmental, and economic into understanding what is the current condition of Waikiki Beach. Which structures are getting older? Which structures might we want to start to think about replacing? When I say structures, I mean things like groins that go into the water, breakwaters and things like that. And many people may not realize it, but what you see in Waikiki was not at all planned or envisioned in any way to be what it is now. It evolved into what it is. And if you look at the progression of structures in Waikiki, it started with what we call the Eva groin of the Kuhio Beach area. So the Dukanamoku statue, if you're facing the ocean, it's that swim area on the left. That was the first segment to be breakwatered and have a groin. Then a beach was placed and then about 10 years later it started progressing towards Diamond Head. And long story short, it ended up being what it is now. But again, none of it was planned out in any comprehensive way. So I've been working closely with the Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association, Rick Eggid and his group, and providing the technical background behind some of the beach management priorities. And we've just finished a beach management plan for Waikiki. So we're trying to take a look at what are our priorities moving ahead, really trying to realistically answer what is the community vision for Waikiki if we start thinking about things like sea level rise and what that could mean in Waikiki. We need to anticipate where erosion is going to occur. And so we're trying to be more proactive in some of our beach management. You're filling my head with questions. Uh-oh. I've stolen Eversol. And I'm going to ask him my questions when we come back from this short break. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000-year odyssey where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us and stay with us as we explore all of the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us. Aloha. Hello, everyone. I'm Yukari Kunisei, the host of the Japanese broadcast of Hello, Hawaii. I'm here from 2 o'clock on Monday, every Monday. I'm here at the Japanese community. I'm here at the Japanese community for useful information, news, and other guests. Hello, everyone. I'm here on Monday, every Monday. Please watch. I'm Yukari Kunisei, the host of Hello, Hawaii. OK, we're here on a given Friday afternoon with Dolan Eversol from the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program, which is associated with NOAA, and which is looking at many things important to the community about the way sea level rise works and especially in the way the sand works in Waikiki and the beach and at the core of our economy. So you mentioned before, and it did evoke a question in me, is that you have a group, you're forming a group, or you already established a group to look at the vision of what Waikiki should be in the future with a view to determine what steps you can take to preserve whatever beach you need for that vision. So tell me about the group and tell me about what kind of vision has been revealed so far. Sure, yeah. I'm happy to say that there are a number of organizations, government departments, and individuals very interested in Waikiki. And one example of that is the recent formation of what's called the Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association. I know it's a mouthful, but just know that it is one of three tax districts in the city and county of Honolulu. Fort Street Mall happens to be one of the three tax districts. And this new tax district is about three years old. It assesses a special tax to the landowners in Waikiki. So it's only Waikiki and it's only commercially zoned property. So residential properties do not pay this tax. It comes in with a property tax and it's a special relatively small assessment in addition to your property tax that goes into a special fund that the Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District manages. And this money generates the potential partnership with the State Department of Land and Natural Resources to do projects. So we're really happy that whereas in the past, there was a lot of concern about how do we pay for this, who's going to pay for this new beach and this new structure. We are really not in that position anymore. There's a strong commitment from this tax district and the beach management district to cost share with the state 50-50 on new beach improvements. So what? So the special fund, the Waikiki Beach Improvement Fund, whatever the name, is going to pay 50-50, 50% and what? The state of Hawaii pays the other 50. That's right. And when we say the state of Hawaii, we mean what, the tourism authority? What do we mean? Or is it out of the general fund? No, this would be through the Department of Land and Natural Resources. So they have a beach fund that they can use for projects like this. They also, more realistically, would probably go to the legislature to request additional funding for new projects. And being able for the DLNR to be able to go to the legislature and say, we already have a 50-50 cost share, it adds a lot of credibility. Like matching funds. We have matching funds in place. But one of the other examples of some of the work that's going on, a collaboration between the University of Hawaii, the Beach Improvement District and the DLNR, there's a nice partnership that's formed there, is we've recently created a community advisory committee for Waikiki Beach. And this is a committee of 30-some-odd individuals that represent the beach boys in Waikiki, the surfing community, the lifeguards, the city and county officials, state officials, hotel management officials. So there's a whole variety of people on this committee. And we've been asking questions of the committee about what is their vision for the future of Waikiki. What do we want Waikiki to look like? And one of the hard pills to swallow is their vision of Waikiki, for many people, is the vision of what Waikiki used to be. And it is no longer in a stable state. And we can. It's so interesting. I totally agree with you. Everybody wants to look back to Webley Edwards and Hawaii calls in the 30s out of the Juana Hotel. But in fact, that's not it. You've got to look forward. That's right. I mean, we can certainly respect and pay tribute to the history of Waikiki and particularly that beach boy lifestyle culture. I think we can all appreciate that. I'm a surfer, and that's part of my history as well. And we certainly want to hear that. And as much as possible, retain that sense of place. However, the beach conditions are such that they are no longer what they used to be. And if we desire a beach of the past, we have to take proactive measures to even obtain what the beach used to look like. Is there any question that we do desire a bigger beach? I mean, I remember years past, everybody was saying, oh, the beach is shrinking. OK, well, you bring down some trucks with sand, and you pour the sand on the beach. Presto, you got more sand on the beach. No problemo. It's not that simple, is it? It is not that simple. That is the history of Waikiki, though, is we would simply bring in sand from somewhere else and put it on the beach. It used to be a lot easier to do that than it is now. And in addition, legally, and we don't do that anymore, where we take sand from another location, another beach, especially, and bring it to, say, Waikiki. Instead, we are now in a position where we're looking offshore, Waikiki, to see the sand that was formerly on the beach that may or may not have come from somewhere else, that was eroded into these offshore sand fields and pumping it back to the beach. You can think of it more as a sand recycling. And it's never a one and done. It's a constant maintenance. You got to keep up with it. It slides down, you bring it back and slides down. It goes back offshore, and you got to bring it back. Kind of like painting your house. You got to do it on a regular basis. But the other thing that we're faced with now is we can't just keep up with doing just that. We're going to have to redesign some of the structures in Waikiki to be more stable, and so that a beach is more likely to stay in place longer. So this is the big point of the discussion today. You're going to write a report. You are writing an ongoing report about how it's working, the physical phenomenon, the environmental phenomenon going on. But there must be one or two major principles on how you protect the beach. With groins, gosh, I have no idea. But can you give us a praisey on the options available to an engineer to suggest new infrastructure to protect against a relatively new problem? Yeah, the good news is we are in a very data-rich environment. So we have a very good understanding of things like sea level rise, what that will look like, how that will force the beach to migrate. We can combat that, at least for a short period. I'm a geologist, so when I say short period, I'm thinking 50 to 100 years. I thought you were a surfer. I'm a surfer, too. But there are a number of options available, and the engineering technology has increased as all of our technology has progressed to the point where we can now design things on the computer, run computer models, to see how well it works. And we've been able to refine that technology where it's even from where it was 20 years ago is night and day. So we have very good understanding of what works and what doesn't. The question now is not so much how do we build it. It's more of a question of what do you want? So people say, well, how big does that groin have to be? The question actually is how big of a beach do you want? And we work inversely from that. So if you want a 100 foot wide beach, we know then you need probably two structures to contain it, and they need to be a certain length and a certain distance apart. And maybe in some cases you might put a T on the end of the groin so that it creates a cuspate beach. You could actually do it your own way. We can do it, we can have it our way. You can build it how you want it. There are constraints. Of course, a place like Waikiki, there's a lot of history. There's the reef. And there's, of course, surfing that we want to pay close attention to all the recreational opportunities there and not interfere with that too much. And each one of these constituent groups, the Beast Boys, the surfers, the hotels, they may have a different vision of exactly how much beach they want. Some want more and some want less depending on their way of looking at it. That's partially true. And I would say five years ago that was absolutely the case. Nobody could agree to anything. However, through this new advisory committee, we're seeing more and more agreement on certain things. Like for example, everybody's very concerned about erosion and they think that the beaches need to be better maintained, meaning they need to be bigger and at least bring them back to where they were in the 1980s, which was the peak of the beach width in most of Waikiki. Try to bring it back to what it was at some point. We are challenged with finding enough sand to do that. I mentioned the offshore sand fields. There's only so much sand that you can retrieve. It's not a limited supply. And we haven't found another good resource of sand just yet. So there's some work that needs to be done, but there's some exciting things happening at least within the community of Waikiki and more or less a general agreement that we need to start to do some things. The operative term being start. Is this going on or is this going to go on at a later time? And who has to do what and how much money should we expect to spend on, say, an annual basis to keep up? Yeah, great question. So we're well underway with some engineering studies in partnership with DLNR now. There's projects to investigate what could happen and we have conceptual plans now that we're sharing with this advisory committee on option A, B, C with different groin fields and new beaches and replacement of old beaches and trying to understand where their priorities lie. And I think there's a general agreement within kind of the management team that we don't want to pursue any of these options that the community won't support. So we don't want to be in a kind of a contentious situation. We want to find the path of least resistance and go forward with that. And most of that involves bringing sand into the beach. And in some cases we may have to build some new structures. One example of that is there is approvals already in place and probably construction in about a year to a year and a half for the replacement for the Royal Hawaiian groin, which serves as a really critical groin for Waikiki and it's that curve growing in between the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and the Sheraton Waikiki. It's 90 years old, so it's showing signs of its age and starting to show. They do break down. They can fail catastrophically. In this case, there's concern that it could fail at any moment and so there's plans to replace that with a new groin that will essentially serve in the same function. It won't make the beach really that much different, but it'll be much more stable. If the existing one fails, then the sand is going to wash away, no? Then we have big problems, right? That'll be an emergency and we'll have to figure it out. So all of this is a function of modeling, no? Because you have to build in climate change in general. You have to build in the wind and the waves and the tides and whatever else and try to figure out where it's going to be more sealable rise and where less and then you have to figure out what your structure, your plan, the engineering plan for your new structure is going to do, whether it's going to succeed or not. And then I heard you talking about this before we started the show. You have to figure out what you're doing. Is it going to satisfy these community expectations and is it going to satisfy the ongoing need to have Waikiki serve as the engine of our economy? Can you talk briefly about that? Yeah, that's a great point that, you know, we've been talking a lot about the engineering aspects of designing with things in mind. That's a critical component, but it's not the only part of this, you know, redesigning of Waikiki. We need to think about aesthetics. We need to think about recreation, economics. And I hate to admit it, there's politics involved with some of this too, it's, you know, who takes kind of credit for certain things. And just an oblique off that is the permitting issues where you have to satisfy 27 permitting agencies before you can dig one shovel full of sand. Yeah, and just on that note, that's a really good important point that I wanted to make is five years ago, we were in a place where I think many of the Beach Boys and some of the surfing community were kind of arms cross, just leave it alone, don't mess with Waikiki, just let it be. I can assure you that is not the case now. People are, the Beach Boys and the Life Guards are very concerned about erosion. And now they're asking, what's the delay? What's going on? How come things aren't happening? So we went from don't do anything to, okay, now pick it up, that's understandable. But as you pointed out, there are regulatory constraints with how fast you can move these projects forward. We are about to embark in partnership with the DLNR on a whole slew of new projects in Waikiki. The Royal Hawaiian growing is the first of many. And if we desire to maintain a beach in Waikiki, that's what it will take it. We're gonna need some new structures in Waikiki to help maintain the beach, in addition to bringing sand in. And maybe lastly, I wanted to mention one more thing about Waikiki that makes it a bit unique. I like to mention that Waikiki is not like other places for a whole bunch of reasons. One of which we started this conversation today is it's a manmade beach to start with. It's not in a natural state, it's out of equilibrium. And we're trying to force a beach into this manmade environment, which wasn't really engineered right to begin with. So we wanna take a step back and take a look at that and how can we make it more efficient. But it's an important contrast to other areas around the state that are maybe not Waikiki and they're more rural in their conditions. You could take a place like Kailua Beach or the North Shore, for example. And we probably are not gonna be talking about building a whole bunch of new structures in places like that that probably need a different approach that might include taking a step back from the shoreline and allowing the shoreline to be in a more natural state. A more natural evolution. In a more natural evolution where it can migrate landward and you kinda get out of the way. We're not quite there yet in Waikiki. That might be in the eventual future condition of Waikiki, but we're not there yet. It's gonna change, it is changing. People don't realize, they are coming to realize, as you see, that sea level rise and climate change affects our community, our lives, everything around us, especially in Hawaii, which is an island state. And so actually the Sea Grant College is in the perfect place. This is what you were born to do. This is what the university should be doing in every capacity, helping the community, providing science to help community problems. It's really wonderful. And I think you are raising public awareness and you're solving these problems or at least you're setting up structures that will solve these problems. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Jay. Evan, thanks for coming on the show. Sure, problem.