 I'm Jay Fidel. This is Catching Up on Kaka Ako. Today we're going to talk about climate change and sea level rise in Kaka Ako, Mackay with Chip Fletcher of SOS that you ate. Thank you, Jay. It's good to be back. So, you know, Think Tech has been covering Kaka Ako since Think Tech began. We have had an enormous number of shows back in the old years. We had all these people come around and talk to us about what was appropriate in Kaka Ako. How critically important it was for planning and for dealing with the environment and so forth. And some of those shows we still have. And there was so much discussion about leaving it as a park. There's so much discussion about preserving it as a place of recreation and relief for people to get away from the madding city, so to speak. And now we are here again, where there's a bill in the legislature that would permit or reverse the limitation on residential construction in Kaka Ako, Mackay. So much blood through our minds and memories about all of that. But I thought it'd be great to talk to you because you have studied, you know, the, what do you want to call it, the topography, the sea level rise implications along that whole shore around the whole of Oahu, actually. And you can talk to us about how sea level rise and climate change will, in the next few years, affect any kind of construction there or, you know, in similar areas along the coast. So, can you talk about climate change, sea level rise in Kaka Ako, Mackay? What is likely to happen there? What effect is likely, what is going to be the effect of all of that on construction? Yeah, thank you. So there are two primary things we should be worrying about. One is sea level rise. The other is heat, H-E-A-T. And just to sort of touch on heat first, NOAA and the National Weather Service and some other agencies are starting to tell us that we can expect an El Mino, possibly, this coming summer. And over next year, the last significant El Mino we saw in Hawaii was in 2015, 2016, and we saw record setting heat waves. I remember in the summer of, I think it was 2018 or 2019, when we did not have an El Mino, but we had a marine heat wave, body of warm water settling around Oahu. We broke 300 temperature records in Honolulu that summer. So, if and when we see an El Mino, we may expect some extremely hot summertime and fall temperatures. And Kakaako Mackay and Kakaako writ large, in fact, all of urban Honolulu has not yet implemented shade or heat mitigation efforts in community design. So that's one thing we need to worry about. Now, with regard to sea level rise, of course, we get flooding and we get multiple types of flooding. We may have typical south shore summertime, high wave events, splashing up over the seawalls, running into the community, the first block, maybe the second block of the community, depending on where we're located. And as sea level goes up this seasonal non-storm, not a hurricane, this seasonal wave is going to be flooding further and further landward. What does seasonal mean? How often is this season? Is that once a year or more? Yeah, seasonal is once a year. And then when it comes to waves on the south shore of Oahu, we're talking summertime. That's when we see surf events, folks grab their boards, they go to Waikiki, they go body surfing at Point Panic off of Kakaako Mackay, etc. Then, of course, we do have the rising incidents of hurricanes. So science research has shown that tropical cyclones have been migrating away from the equator. And for Hawaii, that means that tropical cyclones or hurricanes that would previously pass south of the Big Island are now approaching at the same latitude as the Hawaiian islands. And so we may see more hurricanes as a result of this. In fact, although the statistics don't bear it out yet because it's been such a short time period, but over the last five to eight years, we've seen quite a few hurricanes come close or actually touch on to the islands. And hurricanes are... You talk about more hurricanes, but what about the extreme quality of the hurricane? That's what I was just going to mention, where hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly. You may recall hurricane, oh, I'm blanking on its name, but the hurricane that was barreling down towards Honolulu. It intensified from a hurricane intensity one to a hurricane intensity four literally overnight. And this is a new characteristic of hurricanes. But then we have other types of flooding. We have the storm drain system, the drainage system, which is designed to use gravity to drain off rainfall, to drain off runoff. That storm drain system is getting backfilled by rising sea level. And several times a year, typically during our king tides, our storm drain system fails. And that's because it is filled with saltwater. And should it rain at that time, that rain has nowhere to go. And we saw exactly this happen on December 5th and 6th in 2021 when a cone of storm, a cone of low hit the south shore of Oahu. It hit exactly when there was a king tide happening and we had standing water that was two to three feet deep in Waikiki and other areas on the south shore. So our storm drainage system really at high tide as a gravity designed engineering infrastructure is no longer effective. It doesn't work by gravity anymore. We need to start thinking about pumped drainage where the storm drain system removes rainfall at high tide by pumping. So those are the main forms of flooding that will take place. Storm drains backflowing on the streets, waves splashing up and running over the shoreline. And then actually, let me also mention groundwater flooding. The water table is very close to the land surface under Kakaako and Waikiki. And at high tide, there are places where the water table already is nearly breaking through the ground surface. And what is that called? It's called a wetland. And so at high tide, we get a temporary wetland for an hour or so, and then the tide goes down again. So I do have a map that shows some of these features. If you're interested, I could walk us through that. Oh, sure. But one of the things I want to ask you about is that Kakaako Makai is the product of a refuse station for many, many decades. And it has many tens of feet of garbage under the top soil that was put there to create the park. So there's not that much top soil, but there's an awful lot of garbage. And the garbage, of course, is, I don't know the right word for it, but from an engineering point of view, it's like porous. Water will, it's not the same as soil. Water will go through compacted garbage or uncompacted garbage. And especially when you when you realize that that the garbage gives off methane, and there are pipes there, you know, to relieve the methane and so forth. So any of these processes that you've been talking about exacerbated by the fact that this is not really land. This is, you know, an old transfer station. I think the primary issue there is the water quality will suffer wherever either the groundwater table or the overwashing waves come in contact with this refuse. So I don't know how this refuse is sort of wrapped or packaged. But I think that as we start getting towards four to six feet of sea level rise at the end of the century, we have to wonder how secure is this refuse. Even if it is wrapped, will it become buoyant? Will we see it become unstable? No doubt already the water table is in or around this pile of refuse. So exactly, you know, is the refuse leaching out toxins and pollutants into the coastal water area already? Will it leach into the groundwater table, Maoka of the park where the water table breaks through the land surface? These are all issues that need to be thought about. And we already know that the water table is already heavily polluted here. We refer to an aquifer under this area, but it's not drinking water. It's brackish and it's got toxins and pollutants that have filtered into the water table from all of the surrounding land uses. So we already know that the water table is unclean. What effect would construction of a high rise say, for example, a 40 story residential condo, a big one high rise, have on the process he's already underway? Well, I, so I'm not a construction engineer and I can't answer intelligently here, but I can. I think it's not hard to imagine deep piles going down to solid bedrock. There must be deep piles supporting already are large buildings. And so I think there must be a mechanism where they don't need to use the refuse area or even any of the land area as their primary foundation. I don't know if they're driving in deep piles or deep, deep footers, so to speak. Okay, why don't you show us your, your invitation map. Okay. So, Jay, this is a tool we have in my research team where we can simulate the flooding related to sea level rise to a limited extent. And the setup right here is two feet of sea level rise, which under some models may occur by 2060 or 2070. It may not be apparent to you that there's any flooding at all but if I zoom in, these green blobs that you see are areas of flood water coming out of individual storm drains. And there are a few of them already in existence at two feet of sea level rise. Let's take a look now at three feet of sea level rise. These areas expand. And we see more of them. Almost every block shows us flood water, salt water coming out of storm drains. And at four feet of sea level rise. This becomes very extensive. Now this is basically the failure of the drainage system for many hours a day. And if we zoom out, you can also see in blue areas where there's direct marine flooding of ocean water. So green represents water coming either from the groundwater table or out of the storm drains onto the streets and blue represents direct sea water flooding over the shoreline. This does not represent wave flooding, which we know this whole parking area. On the shores of Honolulu Harbor, we know this area gets subjected to severe wave flooding. Our models indicate wave flooding over next to Kuala Boat Basin. The park itself or the refuse is buried has higher elevation and isn't subject to as much wave flooding. So this is four feet of sea level rise, which is a good estimate of how high sea level will rise by the end of the century provide provided that we don't see catastrophic rates of melting in West Antarctica, primarily. So the area you're talking about the park is on that chart at the bottom bottom left of that map. We can see your cursor. So I suppose it's right right in that area right there and and the park ends at that building with the white roof on it. Yeah. Yep. And the walkway along the water that you can see that are running all the way. This the walkway along the water, the seaward edge of the park. These areas would be hit very hard by waves in the summertime when we have swell coming up out of the southern hemisphere and that is not shown here. Can we can we talk about what that means. In other words, if I'm, if I'm, I want to know in the park. If I'm walking along the walkway if I'm, you know, they are physically or if I build something there. What effect would that have on where I stand and where that structure stands, would I be able to continue to stand there. Well, I don't think that walkway itself will be very usable in four feet of sea level rise. As far as a structure. We design any sort of structure that we envision. So, a structure that is designed to live with water one that would allow waves to flow underneath it, or through the first floor for the half a dozen times in the summertime when large swell events arrive. That's completely possible to design and build. I don't think that building in an area exposed to four feet of sea level rise is the problem. I think the problem is designing a larger community where you can still drive to that building where you still have access to and from that building to the larger community because no building represents. A community of its own. You need to go out shopping you need to go to work, etc. So, you can see the large parts of the neighboring region are quite questionable so we shouldn't just be thinking about a single building. We should be thinking about the whole region it needs to entirely adapt to sea level rise and it can be done property by property parcel by parcel. We need to consider buried infrastructure we need to consider roads, open spaces as well as the building stock. When you say consider I think you mean that we have to take steps with regard to all all the structures all the walkways all the connections all the parking, all the buildings. They can, they can be reached, and that they can function as part of a what a community of buildings. And what it sounds like just listening to this discussion is that this is extraordinary steps that it will cost a ton of money to do any one of them and to do a whole community of them will be fantastic in terms of the cost. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying, which actually means the question that we're talking about is more than just the kakaako Mackay question. It is about all of kakaako and wiki key and in fact all of the Hawaiian shoreline. This must be done. And something I neglected to mention is that the intergovernmental panel on climate change reports that have been coming out since 2021. Make clear, in their terms in their words with high confidence that sea level is going to continue to rise for over 1000 years. This is not a temporary problem. This is a permanent new condition on the shoreline for all of our communities to take in to assimilate and to envision a new future it's actually if you want to, you know, look at the glass half full. This is a real opportunity for us, and we still have time before the worst of this is going to hit the worst of this will begin to become apparent by mid century and thereafter. We're talking about exponential sea level rise and so by mid century we start to see very rapid rates of sea level rise taking place. So we essentially have 20 years to do the planning to find the funding to implement the construction so that our communities can can continue to function with higher sea levels which are inevitable. You said on the city planning rather climate change commission right and she used to I used to. I stepped off last summer from the lens of that, you know, looking at it through that commission and the kinds of things they study and recommend and so forth. What can government do to make this this new new community you're talking about to put it in in in the right condition to prepare for sea level rise. I haven't seen it. Is there anything happening there and the other man part of my question is, can you do this on a societal basis. In other words, can you take steps to make the whole city of Honolulu better prepared, or must you go building by building past by past lot by lot. What the government can do is develop procedures policies, really permit requirements so that whenever an application for a project comes in whenever renovation or repair comes in for government permit that there are requirements. Among all the other requirements that are already in place, there are requirements to prepare for sea level rise and our Department of planning and permitting at the at the city is well aware of this problem. I began with the previous mayor Kirk Caldwell issuing a mayoral declaration to plan for sea level rise and the climate commission at that time, provided a guidance paper, and there has been an update to that guidance paper as of this past summer. So, guidance is in place from sort of the 30,000 foot level broad based guidance. We also have the long range planning folks at DPP, who have looked at other cities and how they have developed policies with regard to sea level rise, and sort of considered how they might apply to the primary urban core, and they've issued two reports which are available online on the DPP website so there's been strong movement. But I don't know that we yet have permitting requirements in place for independent developers to come in. I do know, lastly, that individual departments at the city and county are required to look at sea level rise in all of their activities and their budgets, and that the city department of the city program for climate change, sustainability and resiliency is really working very well integrating all the different city departments and bringing them under a sort of a single umbrella on the same plane of thinking in these areas. But it's not like building a city wall of building structures that would save us from sea level rise as a city project or a state project. It's a matter of getting up permitting requirements. In other words, if I want to build something, I have to meet these permitting requirements and it's on me. I have to find the money privately, as part of my project, to pay for these additional elements of infrastructure, and that changes the community in the sense that any construction now has another test for feasibility because of the additional expense. Have you talked about that? Yeah, well, that's exactly what I'm describing. So there are permitting requirements for flooding already. Unfortunately, they don't take sea level rise into account quite yet. The permitting requirements for your plumbing, for your electrical, I mean, everything has requirements. This now will be a new set of criteria that you need to meet. And fundamentally, it comes in the design phase. Like, are you going to go slab on grade on a low elevation parcel where floodwaters can come in and damage the first floor? No. We're going to need to do post-imperial or a large podium. And, you know, these, for a large building, these features can now become public gathering spaces. We want to build shade in there. We also want to be able to catch the rainfall for our parcel so that we aren't overburdening a drainage system that, as we've been talking about, no longer is capable of drainage under higher sea level. There's lots of news under the sort of rubric of sustainability and resiliency. That's what all this means. If we don't do that, what if the permitting requirements don't get adopted or don't get adopted in time or that they underestimate the threat, you know, and these natural processes you're talking about have their way with us? What happens to our community? What happens to Ako-Makai? I think we're looking at a community that becomes increasingly damaged by floodwaters, a community that really is not a new, renovated, vibrant community, a community that has been thoughtfully planned for the future. Instead, we'd be looking at a community that is on its way down into, you know, an urban location where people don't want to go. Because? Because you would have roads that are riddled with potholes, you would have the smell of the in-ground sewage lines coming up through the ground, all of the unconnected in-ground sewage disposal septic tanks and cesspools, they all need to be replaced. You would have sort of a growing mold from all the repeated flooding of surfaces that weren't designed for it. You'd have the randomness of people trying to go to an area and encountering floodwaters and having to turn around to go somewhere else for a movie or a restaurant or recreation and deciding, well, it's not worth taking the chance to go there anymore. That's just, you know, that's just a very short list of what is probably hundreds of reasons why people wouldn't be investing, they wouldn't be renovating, they wouldn't be redesigning. Really interesting. You spoke about, I hope I got this right, four foot by mid-century. No. What? By the end of the century. By the end of the century. Yes. By mid-century. One foot. One foot. Okay. And it doesn't, I have this absurd image in my mind that on January 1st of 2050, all of a sudden, boom, the water goes up a foot. No, that's not what happened. Right. It goes up gradually. And, you know, and by 2049, it's a good part of that, but it's already inundated. So the question I put to you is, you know, how accurate is that? And what kind of, you know, process do we have now? Like what's going to happen in five or 10 or 15 years? I guess it's going to be gradual, but as it is gradual, these things you're talking about happen. Yeah. So, so yesterday and today we had a huge wave event take place on the North Shore. We had the Eddie I. Cal surf take place. And all day I've been receiving photos from folks up on the North Shore showing where waves have run under their homes, where they've run onto the one main highway that runs through the area. One person sent me a measurement of 350 feet, which is how far the wave ran down a road going Malca the whole way. Now, when was the last time that surf was this big? It was maybe a decade or two ago. This, this, you know, the Eddie has been held more often, but we have particularly large surf happening yesterday and today. So that's sort of the 10 year, the decadal type of wave event. As sea level rises exactly what we saw yesterday and today will occur every nine years, every eight years, every five, every year. So these extraordinary extreme events are going to occur with greater and greater frequency. If that serves as an example of what the future looked like. On the South Shore. We could talk about King Tides. Now these King Tides people are used to them now we know that we've been seeing them for. We've actually been seeing them for a couple of decades, but there's been great press coverage in recent years. King Tides are already back flooding out of the storm drains coming up through the ground and driving waves up over the beach and into the into the back shore development. So those are instead of occurring twice a year, they're going to be occurring every month, then they're going to be occurring every week and finally every day. Wow. All that is by mid century under one foot of sea level rise the rare King tide that we see today is going to be occurring every day. How confident are you that it will not exceed one foot by mid century. I mean there are many factors working here. Yeah, I'm not confident that it won't exceed one foot by mid century. We do not understand the physics of the West Antarctic ice streams. And they are, they are the large uncertainty here, whether we see rapid acceleration of ice flow out of West Antarctica into the ocean, driving perhaps six feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Which is considered within the envelope of possibility. In fact, if, if you're going to be designing or planning a major urban project, you really should be planning for six feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. And that, and that would affect the specifications in the permitting requirements. Very, very much. Yes, indeed. It would make those fulfilling those requirements all the more expensive. Yeah. You know, it strikes me that we really we as a community we as a state haven't really fell it up to this. We don't really recognize it. Perhaps there's been more than you're aware of for instance, you know will elevated rail be extended from Chinatown to Alamo on a center. That's a question right now, but it has already been redesigned with six feet of sea level rise in mind. It's, it's been redesigned so that the electronics at the rail stations are lifted above a six foot high flood level should roads be raised six feet to accommodate sea level rise. They have raised portions of the rail so there's still a federally allowable height clearance for trucks traveling passing under the rail. Transit oriented development around rail stations that where we're in an area subject or exposed to sea level rise has been redesigned with sea level rise in mind there's actually been quite a bit done. So raising the level of roads and other infrastructure. My goodness gracious if you wanted to protect the, the, the South shoreline of Oahu, you'd have a lot of roads to raise. This would be very expensive and it would, it would have a huge impact on anything near the shoreline, including especially why key key the engine of our account. So that's where it's important to think about, maybe not every single road is going to be raised. Maybe not every single parcel and every single building. Can we afford to adapt to sea level rise. These are extremely expensive problems. Are we going to raise these various features by filling the land with with Phil, or are we going to build a sort of a mechanical and engineered device where sort of you have a low fly over bridge for a road. If we make a whole series of levees of raised roads like, you know, like a series of rice paddies in between them the parcels are still going to flood from from groundwater flooding. And there'll be no communication between them. There'll be no flow of the water. These waters will become stagnant. They're already severely polluted as they rise up out of the ground. It's a huge problem. And, and really we need our design community professionals are professional design consulting community in Hawaii. I believe the legislature should should fund several million dollars to bring our professional design community together to form a task force or working group and to come up with a new plan for Waikiki kakaako. Evil a another low line critical parts of our of our urban community and put together a plan for us and then we need to start moving on that plan. Yeah, it has to be coordinated in a comprehensive way. You know, you can't just say well this building has to comply with these specs and that building has to comply. It has to be the whole area. So my question is, from what you've seen what you know, and from what the requirements would be, and what the speed of the climate change and feel of a rise would be. You know, what how soon can we do this. And in the interim, what should we be doing. Should we be building more 40 story condos near the water that doesn't seem that doesn't seem advisable. Well, so this is a, this is a timing issue. You can't just raise a road because when it rains you're going to cause more flooding on the adjacent parcels as the road sheds the water. This is a relationship issue. The public agencies and the private landowners and the developers and the hotel community, they, they need to build a relationship so the things are done together. This is a public comment issue because, you know, let's say a plan suggests that a set of parcels over there really don't fit in the general scheme. Let's say that an area where we currently have a lot of automobile traffic is proposed to become a walkable venue. All of this needs to be vetted and that process we know is a is a long multi opinionated process. Lots of people like to weigh in on their communities and they have the right to. So getting this plan together, I would say that we are so far sort of behind schedule. We need to move quickly on this because the process of planning itself before we even break ground on some of this stuff. That could easily be five years or more. Yeah, and unless we forget that people people speak out of self interest. They speak because they are property owners or will be property owners and they have a. So this politics involved. But let me ask this, say it's five years, that's 10 years before we can, you know, get a system going here, which, which works. I mean, we don't, you know, it's not like we know for sure that any of these systems will work. They may have to be tested and tuned before we know. And while we're testing and tuning, we may have surprises from Mother Nature. But that makes us change our minds about it. So in the five or 10 years or whatever it is, what do we do chip? What do we do about developing near the water? Well, I think one of the first things that needs to happen is DPP needs to act on the knowledge it already has and start putting in place some obvious low hanging fruit requirements with regard to flooding related to sea level rise. You know, we, there's no doubt that this is going to happen. So science is fully on the side of one foot of sea level rise by mid century and, you know, three to potentially six feet by the end of the century. There's some obvious things that we can do to prepare for this already. The drainage infrastructure picking a few primary roads. And then I think the legislature needs to consider the possibility of major investment in the local design community. So perhaps there are some planning tools where a situation like this has been encountered before where an entire community is an urgent almost a crisis situation and some sort of overlay authority is created where planning can go forward. Not with community input, but not with the endless back and forth and nimbyism and, and, you know, personal interests driving my opinion only stalling progress. I don't, you know, I don't know, but something along those lines. I would be right to say that this, this even the interim steps here, that primary steps, the step the first step are going to take a little while to organize them to make it real to fund it to get by, you know, various various objections of one kind or another. And in that period, you know, from a scientific point of view from a, you know, a development of the city point of view, shouldn't we hold up. Shouldn't we hold up. What do you mean. Well, if tpp doesn't know exactly what its rules are going to be. If the state doesn't have an organization bill, if it hasn't funded a comprehensive planning process, should we just, you know, keep on going. Should we just build as if none of this was a problem. Just, you know, do what we were doing before, or should we wait. I don't think, well, I don't know you're trying to pin me down on something that I'm very hesitant to take one side or the other I'm going to reject your black and white suggestion that we wait or we don't wait. And I think that the reality is more gray than that. I think responsible developers. I think most of our development community is very responsible. I think they're already aware of sea level rise. I know they are. I don't think that anybody wants to build a white elephant that, you know, in 20 to 40 years turns out to be impractical. I don't think that we can rely wholly on that as a coherent design for moving forward. I urge all of the agencies responsible for permitting and and design of our urban community. In fact, our entire shoreline community to to move quickly to realize that time is wasting and that there's no more information we're waiting for science has already all of the data points and future milestones in terms of how high and and at what time sea level will reach. There's already plenty of basis for planning what a new community will look like. Okay. I think you wanted to show us your chart one more time. I'm happy to. Here is five you can see that areas that were dominated by green which is flooding not related to direct overland saltwater flow. Now the area becomes subject to direct ocean flow and six feet certainly is within the realm of possibility before the end of the century. We're looking at a very problematic urban core. I greatly appreciate you coming on and engaging with me on this. And I look forward to our next discussion. Thanks so much. Thank you, Jay. I do as well. Thanks for the discussion. Donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.