 Aloha, I am your host, Winston Welton, and I'm delighted that you are joining us again today for this exciting session of Out and About Where Each. Every other week, actually, we explore a variety of topics, organizations, and events with the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own and not connected with any organization. That said, today joining me in the studio is Dave Watase and also Keri Watase of stopalloyproject.com. Dave is a property owner in Palo Alto Valley where the Army Corps of Engineers has designed a proposed detention basin on his property. Well, there's a lot more to this, but today we're going to explore this topic from the point of view of stakeholders who've felt left out of the process, feel that the process has been flawed from the start, that proper laws to engage the public were not followed, and to point to alternatives that the group is proposing. So there's going to be a lot more of this coming up. You just saw an article in the advertiser on this earlier this week. So with that, I'd like to welcome you to my show, and thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Well, thank you, Winston. I know you, so you are the people that are standing up. You know, I always say when someone points and says someone should do something about that, or they should do something about that, you are the someone, and you are the Dave that are doing something about it. So congratulations, first of all, on just stepping up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal. And so before we even start, I do want to point people to the website, which is stopalloyproject.com altogether. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. And I hear you have had major part in creating that website. It is very user-friendly. It looks great. Oh, thank you. We're still working on it. It's a lot of information. Yeah. Well, a website never finishes, I think. So you've got some great information on there for people to at least get a grasp of what we're going to talk about, because we won't have enough time to talk about this today. One of the things that you have on there is the EIS, which is the Environmental Impact Study, and the final one, which was prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers that was pulled down from their website. But fortunately, you grabbed it and put it on the website. So tell us about that, Dave. What are we looking at here, and what is this proposal? Yeah. Well, Winston, the Alec Now project is a flood mitigation project. It's a $345 million project that the Army Corps finalized and is submitted to Congress for funding. So right now, the state of Hawaii is looking at funding their portion, which is $125 million. And it's not a proposed project. If nobody stands up and tries to slow it down, I think it will be built. So it's a done deal at this point, as long as the dough is appropriated from our state government? You know, I'm not a politician. This is the first time I'm getting involved in it, and I'm scared. Why did you get involved? Well, three years ago, two weeks before the last chance to give public comment, I received a letter in the mail with the one-mile detention base and basically all the engineering design done on my property. And they basically recommended for me to speak out, and I had two weeks to figure it out. Two weeks is not a lot of time when you are confronting a very large engineering document. I'm imagining that it was several hundred pages long at a minimum. Yeah. And when I went to the website, my computer wouldn't scroll down on the PDF. It was so big that I had to download it. And luckily I did that because almost two weeks after the last chance to give public comment, they shut the website down. Yeah, that's actually a very troubling aspect of this. This is a public project, and we're going to be spending money, or it's just anything to do with the public. This thing should be up, made available, because when they take it down, it's just something to hide, right? It's just like feeling like it's like a thing in the middle of the night. That's how it feels to me. I don't know. You're a millennial. What does it feel like to you? It was very difficult to understand just because there were multiple PDFs, and I'd say they ranged anywhere between 700 to 1,000 pages long. It took minutes to download, and it's just engineering, architecture, designs, and charts. I have a marketing background, and just scrolling through it quickly, I was thinking, what government official who had to look over it and say, this is fine, would understand it, and actually read through the thousands of pages. The thousand pages. And I think the idea behind this is that this is the U.S. Corps of Engineers which has the obligation to, it's a dual mission, actually controlled by President and the Congress, which are rare events like that, but to protect our waterways. And so people are naturally, I think, inclined to err on the side of conservative, it's like a banker, right? We want to protect things, especially with the crazy flooding we had last year in East Honolulu. But this project has some serious issues, and I think maybe to start with, if we could look at the first slide and show just the scale of what we're looking at for the project here. So walk us through this. This project includes several detention basins in the valleys. Palo Lo has two, Manoha has three. Kanawai Park is to be turned into detention basin, and Makiki has one. On the lower end, they're proposing to turn the Alawai golf course into a detention basin, and the Huston Ditch, Alawai Park, and to build a four-foot solid reinforced concrete wall around the Alawai canal. Now the detention basins only fill up when the storm of a certain magnitude overflows. So it basically holds the water back to allow the Alawai canal to drain, so it doesn't overflow into the hotels. Okay, and so the egg headset might say, what's wrong with that, Dave Watase? Why do you want the hotels to get flooded? Well, you know, I'm not against more storm protection, but this project is based upon protecting Waikiki from the 100-year storm. Okay. And I kind of dispute that. I also dispute the process that they followed because they need to engage the public. I don't think they followed NEPA and HEPA. And what is NEPA and HEPA? The National Environmental Policy Act and the Hawaii National Policy Act. And what do those stipulate? Well, it requires the government to engage the public for comment so that they can hear our concerns and to evaluate different alternatives. Now you said you got a letter two weeks before, three years ago. I sit on the neighborhood board. I haven't heard anything about it in years since I've been down there. So this is something where I don't really feel like I've gotten sufficient information on it. How about your neighbors? Were they surprised by this? Did they know about it and thought, oh, they're never going to do it? Or did they really care? Or did they know at all? Well, I think some of them were informed. I mean, I was informed, but I was given very short notice. The Army Corps told me, well, you know, this project has been going on for 20 years and hasn't been built yet. And I wasn't sure if it was going to actually become a reality. I put my name on the website. You know, I mean, they had a sign up. So I said an email sign up that if anything happens, they're supposed to notify me and get me involved. What's the rush right now for the Army to build this thing? If it's been on for 20 years, why now? Because I think the money's there. Congress approved it. And it seemed like this was like $100 million or $75 million many years ago, five years ago or something like that. How did it suddenly? Oh, yeah. That to me should be a red flag to our politicians. Is that in the draft EIS stage, the project was about $180 million project and they projected the estimated property damage at $318 million. And behind closed doors without public oversight, they finalized the EIS and it soared up to a $345 million project and projected $1.14 billion of property damage. So I don't know how it grew so big so fast. So the real cost is actually more like one projected cost of $1.7 million, $1.8 million. Not $300 million. Well, that's a projected benefit. A benefit? Okay. The benefit is what the project will protect. Okay. Theoretically it's going to protect. But if we look at the train, what was the train which was going to be $3 billion and now it's $8 or $10 or someone said it's going to be $20 by Elsa and done. Let's look at the next slide and see here why you say this model is flawed because we have a quote here from the Army Corps of Engineers. It will absolutely happen. It's just a matter of time. So this is the 100 year flood model. Tell us about this and why you, what are we really looking at here? What do you think we're looking at here? Well, this is like a 3D model. This is what they call the 100 year storm. And I think it's a scare tactic. I mean, if you look at it, right, I mean, the University of Hawaii is underwater, Ilani School, Aleg golf course, Kapahulu, Waikiki is all flooded out. The thing is this storm is supposed to occur once every 100 years. And the other canal started 100 years ago and we've never had a flood that big. Well, it's a good point, which brings us to the next slide, which is another model that they had projected on. So we have here, and what is this one carry that we're looking at? So this is the projected flood of the five year flood. So it's supposed to happen every five years and a lot of Honolulu is flooded and underwater. I'm 26 years old, so I should have seen about five of these storms, but I haven't seen any. Oh, actually, well, yeah, we should have seen, let's see, five of these, right? We should have seen 20 years in the last 100 years. And I don't remember anything like that in the last while. So even the last 25 or 30 years, but you're looking at a large area being flooded every five years. So your base, your contention here is that this modeling is flawed just based on there. I think it's exaggerated, yeah. Exaggerated, okay. And you know, sea level concern, storm surges, flooding, climate change, these are real issues that are coming down the pike. So how do we deal with this? How do we make sense of this, of this information when we're given something by the Corps of Engineers, who we trust to make professional, logical, sane decisions based on protecting the public, but these models that they're using, maybe they're projecting out in the future and imagining what might be, which I could understand. But if we should have seen something like this happen in the past. Yeah, well, if you read the EIS, you know, the models are based on historic data. And past storms that have hit the islands. So our canal is basically over top two or three times, twice in the 1960s. And the most damage that they've had is on record is $10,000. So I'm thinking one of those storms was probably the 100-year storm. Okay. Well, and it's, I think it goes to show that our world is changing. And so there, I appreciate the attempt of the Corps of Engineers to address this issue. But my, the main troubling concern I have is the lack of public input and notification of the neighborhood boards and our elected officials. And I see you've gotten letters from a lot of different people here that are concerned about this. I think our next slide addresses that one, which was from Iolani School. What did they say? Iolani, their concern was they weren't being protected by the alternative measure that was selected. Okay. And not only Iolani, but, you know, there's a lot of other areas that were kind of sacrificed. But this slide right here is a comparison of the 10-year model and the 100-year model. If you really look at it, there's not much difference. Well, again, the 10-year flood should have happened every 10 years. I've never seen one like that. I think if it, if we ever had a flood like that, you know, half of what KK would be on the water, we'd be screaming it was the mother of all storms. And I think it's going to happen anyway. But the part that concerns me is it where Iolani School stating this EIS lacks scientific integrity and should be rejected. In this case, it's clear the scientific analysis, modeling and methodology are flawed and cannot be relied upon. Now obviously sixth grade students didn't come with this up with this at Iolani School, although I'm sure they probably could give a coherent response, but they hired engineers to give a response like that. So Iolani School is saying, let's not go so fast here. You have other letters from Ann Kobayashi, who represents the district, saying public really hasn't had an adequate chance to weigh in on this. What other outreach have you had where you found that the public really doesn't know what's going on? Well, again, neighborhood boards. I think Manohar Network Board, you know, they voted for resolution. Yes. And they did it actually very quickly. They even drafted the resolution for me. And they took that initiative. And I think it's because they understood that they weren't engaged either. And what was the gist of the resolution? Well, the resolution basically, you know, is asking the Army Court to stop, you know, so that they can be engaged and informed about the project. And it also is asking the state legislature, you know, not to fund their portion of it. Again, to give the public time to be informed about the impacts of the project. I think it's really significant that it's happening. And this is going to affect about seven or eight neighborhood boards, I think. And you're going to be going to all of them, hopefully. But when Manohar, which arguably stands to have a lot of damage from something like this, Moie Laylee Moore, so be looking out Moie Laylee for this, too. When they're saying we need to take a breather on this, and was it a unanimous vote to ask them to do that? Or were there some extensions or? You know, I think there were some people that, you know, want flood protection. Yeah. But I think when they understood that it was a matter of a process. Yeah. We didn't hear any opponents, you know, for the project. OK, so at this point, the neighborhood board is just saying, let's take a breather. Let's look at this thing again. It's not that they're necessarily against it. It's just that the process is really critical here and getting that down. And I think that that's the most troubling aspect for me is. I'm for protecting Waikiki. I'm for getting more federal money for our islands, you know, but there's a process. Nobody wants to see flooding or damage, but we're just questioning the process and seeing is this the best thing and are there other alternatives that might take place here? So a lot of really salient points here. We're going to take a little break here. I'm talking with Dave Watase and Kerry Watase of StopAllAwayProject.com. And you can go there now during the break and look out for some more information there. And we will be back in a minute more on Out and About of the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. Hi, my name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power, Hawaii. With ThinkTech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, Maraming, Salamat Po, Mabuhay, and Aloha. Aloha, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. Aloha, we're back. We're live. I'm Winston Welch and this is Out and About on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series, talking about the proposed Alawai Canal flood control project with Dave Watase and Kerry Watase of StopAlawaiProject.com. Before the break, we were talking about the scale of this project. And again, thank you for being here as I'm going to call you citizen activist. So standing up and just saying, I'm not so sure about this. And thank you for doing that. It's meaningful and valuable for everybody who has any questions. Anything to question about what our leaders are doing. All public officials need input and to be held accountable to this. And it's very easy. Like you said, a thousand page document. How easy was it for anyone to read through that? It probably took, you're in engineering by profession. By schooling. By schooling. And it probably took you a while to read it. And there was probably contradictory information in there or things in there that made you say, wait a minute, this says right here it's not going to protect this area or that area. So can you address any of those things? Yeah, the focus was on protecting Waikiki. Okay. But, you know, and that's what they tell everybody. But if you really look into the EIS and dig into it and we encourage everybody to do that, the areas, Markov, the canal actually get flooded. Moelie. Moelie, Kapiolani side, Kapuulu. It's all designed to flood and they're sacrificed to protect Waikiki. And part of it is, is how they designed it. Whenever you raise the, they want to put a four foot wall above ground level, you know, along the Alwai canal, our storm drainage system works on gravity flow. So the Eros Malka, if the canal is raised, it can't flow above ground. So they're basically forced to flood. And if it's a high tide as well, then probably a lot of that's going to not be mitigated anyway. And have they considered things like installing very large jets or something that would pump the water out or that might go out, you know, a while? What I had proposed, I had proposed like a whole handful of alternatives three years ago in my response, you know, to them proposing to put a detention base on my property. One of them was to put a floodgate at the Alwai, Alwana Boulevard bridge and put flood pumps similar to what they do in New Orleans. Okay. And well, yeah, we know it happened in New Orleans that one of the dykes broke and that was it. The water just flooded in catastrophically. And so this model is actually predicting that that would happen without the dam breaking, essentially, that it would, in the scenario if they build it, it's still going to flood Kakaako, maybe Kakaako, definitely Moeileile, Kapahulu. So I think we need to be aware of that. So you encourage people to go there, dig in there. Yeah. And the thing too is to make it work, our existing system will be capped. They have these mechanical caps that cover the storm drainage as Alwai canal fills up above ground level. Well, I can see this is just one part of a massive sort of way that we have to look at everything with climate change coming because Waikiki, you know, the water already at King Tides last year, I went down to Fort Darussi. The ocean was as smooth as glass, but the water was already coming over the sidewalk right there. So I'm just imagining whether I were either going to have to do some sort of Venice or managed retreat where we decide the city's just going to have to come back this way or maybe Waikiki becomes its own little island with some dykes like Holland. And I don't know, I mean, this is a bigger question and this seems like phase one of mass concrete and pumping. And you know, when the pumps went out 10 years ago, was it, and the raw sewage being poured into Waikiki? I think we really need to look at these all the time and find the best solution for everybody. Not just Waikiki. Yeah. And you had little kids coming in from Hoku Lani Elementary School at the Ranoa Valley. What was that like having little kids there? They were very persuasive. Yes. Little kids sitting because they were emotional and lively and showed up for something. Nobody wanted to disappoint them. No one wanted to disappoint them. Yeah. And I don't want to disappoint our taxpayers. And I think probably the Corps of Engineers doesn't want to disappoint the citizens either. So they may be under some constraints and deadlines that we're not aware of where they've felt a certain pressure to get this through so that they got funding while it was still available because I know how funding cycles are sometimes. So at this point, what should people be doing? They should be going to your website, educating themselves on the project, finding out what points they may or may not agree with. You're going to be showing up at a lot of neighborhood board meetings and are those going to be on the website as well where you're visiting? Okay. And citizens can come down and say, you know, we support a resolution saying, let's just look at this like similar one to the one that Manoa passed. And does that resolution on your website too that people can reference? Yes. Okay. Perfect. That one's on the same page as events. So events has all the neighborhood board meetings. Okay. And this is obviously not going to go anywhere too fast, but there might be some, I'm guessing appropriations bills in the Senate and the House right now so that you might say, let's hold off on this. Let's just say that this year we said we're going to hold off while we engage the community. Is that federal money going to go bye-bye or is it there when we want to use it or do you know? I have no idea. Okay. I'm hoping, you know, we can save it and put it to good use. Yeah, because we don't, obviously nobody wants flooding and we've got to do some preparations, but I remember when they were talking about that flood that happened when it rained for 40 days, 10 years ago or 12 years ago. The blockage at, was it Woodlawn Bridge? It wasn't being maintained properly. I mean, right now you can go and you can see these giant sand islands that if water really comes down and a tree comes down, the same thing's going to happen again. So I don't know that these have been addressed either in the EIS. At the neighborhood board meeting in Manoa, a lot of the residents expressed their concerns with the maintenance of all these new structures that were going to be built. Yes. And so they basically said, well, we haven't really seen the government maintain the ones that we already have. What's the, how can we trust that they're going to maintain these new ones so that in the case of a flood, it's not going to be usable or helpful because they haven't maintained it. So that's what they're worried about. Really, really important point. So let's build something else while we have something broken and unfixed already, right? So I'm going to talk about how many hundreds of millions that you age and then planning a new building. I don't really get that. So if we could just quickly look at the rest of the slides here and get an idea of what some of the models are going to look like, maybe one after this one. Let's see. We're looking at maybe the next slide from there. So here is what maintenance and dredging for a Manoa, it's like an example that it's be a few feet high upstream detention basins are substantially larger. This is a smaller one. Yeah, what this is is it's actually in the EIS on the environmental side. So what the Army Corps is doing here is they're giving the public advanced noise and warning of what could happen. So they have a picture of every stream in there. There's a beautiful picture like this one is Manoa stream. And then they have a picture of examples of the maintenance of dredging. So this is just a little four or five foot detention basin. The ones they're proposing are over 30 feet tall. And if you look at this detention basin, the build up, it's not maintained. And they have like several pictures like this. It's in the EIS. In the warning, don't come back to us and tell us later that we didn't give you warning. Yeah, because if the tree is on that one, you see that. And for the next ones, if we could just quickly look at those other ones, we've got another one here of the wood lawn, wood lawn detention basin. And then one after that. So it's just designed to kind of slow down the water there. And this one we fill up, like I said, it has a restrictor. So maybe it allows the two years starting to go through anything above that to start to with hold the water. Now, all these homes around it, nobody knows about it. So one of the residents who did testify, his house is like right in front of the detention basin. Oh, and so there's a lot of people out there that they probably don't need to know this exists out there. So that is probably one of the main focuses that you have, is that it may not be the right thing to do as far as engineering-wise. But in any event, we just haven't had sufficient time as citizens to be engaged in the process. So this is your chance to get engaged, people. I will strongly encourage you to go to your website, which is stopallowiproject.com. And like I said, a great design website, easy to go through. Hard thing is going to be going through the thousand page EIS. But if you want to be informed, you're going to have to go through what they have to say. You also have letters on there, like from Eolani School, from Hokulani, from Anko Bayashi, and other people, as well as maybe some more information about how they can get involved. And unfortunately, as we know, time is always short and it is short today. So I would like to ask you to come back in a while and give us an update on where we're at in this whole project, if you would be so kind to do so. Yeah, that'd be great. And unfortunately, we are out of time. So it has been my great pleasure today to be talking with Dave Watase and Kerry Watase of stopallowiproject.com. Thanks again to both of you. And viewers can visit your website for more information. We welcome your feedback. And for tuning in, thank you as well. We always give a shout out to our broadcast engineer, who I think our broadcast engineer is Robert McLean today. And Eric Calander is our floor manager. And they're both awesome. Jay Fidel, of course, is super awesome. He's our executive producer, who puts all these shows together so that you can be as informed as possible. If you want to be on my show and you have some really great topic, then send me an email. I'll see you every other Monday here at 3 or more and about on Think Tech.