 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Man, 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 and interesting part of everyone's life. It impacts all of our daily lives and we should all embrace it and think of it as a wonderful, enriching process and part of our daily lives. It's not something that should be thought of as relegated to laboratories or done by just some subset of the population, but we're all living it every day. And here to help me talk about that is Michael Hamnet. Michael's a researcher here in the Social Science Research Institute. Welcome, Mike. Thank you, Ethan. And we're going to talk about something that really does impact our lives. The Alibi Canal and Watershed basically. And right before the show, Mike was pointing out this has incredible impacts. The Watershed, which is actually several Ahupua'a that drain into the area of Waikiki, basically. Yeah, it's Minoa, Palolo, Makiki, parts of Kaimukki, Mo'ili-Ili and Kapahulu plus Waikiki. Wow. So, and it's really, economically it's pretty important for the state, but 7% of the gross domestic product comes out of there. Wow. 7%, 7% of the civilian jobs and 9% of state and county tax revenue. Right, because of course it's got Waikiki, which is a big generator of. And about 200,000 residents and about 80,000 visitors on a given day in Waikiki. So, it's pretty significant. Yeah, yeah. So, but the canal has been there for a long time, right? It has. It was built early. It was built in the 30s and 30s century. Yeah. And because of course Waikiki used to be actually just sort of a drainage field, basically, for all these different Ahupua'a, all these watersheds and was largely swampy area, right? Yeah, they drained the swamp and built the canal. Right. Or they built the canal to drain the swamp. Right, right, okay. And of course that has, eventually it's sort of caught up with things, right? Or things have caught up with it, with that process, right? That is, now you've got a lot of water coming down the whole sides, probably much faster than it used to, and entering directly into the canal now instead of flowing across a longer flat area. Yeah, it used to flow across the flatter area in three segments out to the ocean. And now it's all channeled into the canal. Right. And, you know, the state has known it was a potential flood hazard for some time. And in 1998, they started looking at this whole problem. And then several years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers was asked to come in and do a flood study. Now there had been catastrophic floods. In fact, I worked at Research Corporation and in 2004 I came, I was looking at the television on a Sunday night, and there were cars and trees across the street from the Minoa Innovation Center. And that flood went down and caused $85 million for the damage at the University of Hawaii, mostly at the library. So the Corps was asked to come in by the state and the city joined in the study. And they've just completed, last August, a draft environmental impact statement, or final environmental impact statement, and a feasibility study for a flood mitigation project. And the flood—I first heard about this at a community meeting. Kathleen Clark was running up at Minoa District Park. And I was watching the presentation of their estimates of the losses. And, you know, I said to Kathleen, I said, you know, that's our superstorm Sandy. Right, right. Because what's going to happen? And I said, the most likely scenario is it's going to be a category for her. Hurricane coming across the south shore of Oahu, and you're going to get storm surge coming into the canal and across Waikiki, and you're going to get all that rain coming down from the valleys, and it's going to be a mess. Right. And there's this huge differential. Anyhow, because at the top of the Range Mountains there, it gets 150 inches of rain per year, whereas Waikiki only gets 20, 23, something like that. And so it has this capacity to dump a lot of water very quickly, and that happens regularly. And the channelization that's been done doesn't help, and it used to be that water had a great deal of ground to soak into before it got down. Now much of it is channelized, and when that begins to get run off of roads, and roads. And this, and you know, the core looked at what they call a once-in-a-hundred-year flood. That's a flood that has a 1% chance of happening in a given year. And they designed probably a $300 million flood mitigation system that would slow the water down to start with, and they put detention basins up in the valleys, and they put debris catchers in the streams. And that study was finished and completed, and a lot of stakeholders were disappointed in the study, because it, and the Corps of Engineers was told, the local Corps folks were told, restrict your work to flood mitigation. We're not going to do any environmental restoration, we're not going to do any water quality cleanup. It's just, we don't have the money for that. So folks in the stakeholders in the watershed said, wait a minute, we've got to add to the Corps' effort on flood mitigation, and we've got to do environmental restoration in the streams, three streams, and in the forest areas, and we've got to get community involved in thinking about the risks of not just the catastrophic flood, but also catastrophic hurricane. Right, I mean, this is a classic problem where science meets community, right? That is, this isn't something that just happens in the lab and you know, when things go wrong here, they're really impacting the lives of everyone around us. They're washing out roads, you know, washing away homes, they're flooding out libraries, they're hurting the tourism industry, they're really, impacts are many and varied, and we, you can't just look at just the one, I mean, that's sort of like dropping egg and saying, let's not worry about it until it hits the ground, you know, I mean, that's not the time to worry about it, right? Well, and you know, I did a study back in the 90s for the Coastal Zone Management Program, and we looked at the risk of hurricanes hitting Oahu, actually, hurricanes hitting Oahu and Maui and the Big Island as well, and we took the lost figures from Kauai and basically transferred them over to Oahu, so we took the number of hotel rooms on Oahu and the number of hotel rooms on Kauai, and we did the damage losses on Kauai, and we moved it to Oahu. From Kauai? Yeah, and you know, Aniki on Kauai was a $1.6 billion problem, and our modeling, Dave Kennard from FEMA and I did this several years ago, and we said it's a $30 billion problem if it hits Oahu, and it's going to crash the state economy, so that's what got me involved in this ALOI project to look at how can we look more broadly at both what hazards are in the offing here for Waikiki and the ALOI watershed, but also how do we build infrastructure to mitigate the flood risk and the hurricane risk, and there's a lot of things that can be done and some things are already being done now, and it's just an opportunity that we shouldn't miss. Yeah, you want to correct some of the mistakes that have been made in the past, right? Right. It deprives our aquifers of the recharge they need while increasing the risks of flood and making a sort of boom bus cycle of water, and instead, right, you want to set up something with more retention, so more of the water sits for longer periods at various higher elevations, right, and soaks on in there and has less opportunity to come catastrophically rushing down the side of the mountain. And there are lots of green flood mitigation things that could and should be instituted through community groups and schools and whatnot, so rain gardens and bioswales and those sorts of things are all things that we want to look at, and this ALOI watershed collaboration that I'm involved in started in 2015 with a meeting of the stakeholders who wanted the core project to be expanded to include environmental restoration and water quality cleanup, and they decided, like, a lot of meetings that they wanted to continue, and so we've had this. We started out with what was called the ALOI watershed partnership, which was actually suggested by Jean Dachille, and back in 2003, we didn't even know it at the time, Jean Dachille and the folks at Townscape, and then it's since grown, and it's grown in terms of the stakeholders, so we've got, you know, state and county government, we've got the Waikiki Improvement Association, we've got the Wahoo Economic Development Board, we've got Iolani School, we've got the University of Hawaii, we've got Surfrider Foundation, we've got all kinds of people involved in this thing, and we've formed three working groups to look at various aspects of this, and it's going fairly well, and we've just started. One of the things that the group decided early on is that they wanted to look at development of a watershed improvement district for the whole value, and to do a master plan to do all of these things. Right, because one of the issues you face is that lots of different people have little slices of a big pie, right, with authority and or responsibility to take care of certain aspects, but not others, but in the real world, these don't separate out into neat little edges, right? And nature doesn't recognize political boundaries. Right, exactly. And it's difficult, because if you look at the, just take the streams, for example, some of the streams are owned by the city, up in the watershed things are owned by the state, the canal is owned by the state, the city controls other parts of it, so you've got these overlap, or not overlapping, you've got these jurisdictions that have a different authority for doing different things. Right, some of the streams run through private property, and the property owners have some jurisdiction over their own property, right, what they want to do. Some of them haven't even known that they had. And then there are also the streams that have been covered, and that used to be surface streams that are just now run through pipes that people don't even know about, right? Yeah, and there's a guy who did a map of, a GIS map of the whole drainage system, and it, I mean, it looks like a New York subway map. Huh. There are all these underground channels, because it's all the storm drains, and all of the runoff from the whole surrounding area. Right, because it's, again, it's got to be, it really drains a huge chunk of Oahu, drains into a relatively small area there, and you do need to be able to get that water out before it builds up too much there, right? Yeah, and unfortunately, the flood management, stormwater management philosophy for a long time is just get it off the land as fast as possible. Right. Well, that's not necessarily the environmentally best way to go. Right, for one, I mean, it drags a lot of sediment out into onto the reefs and into lagoons and, you know, hurts the layforms there, clouds up the water, brings a lot of pollutants from the land, out into the water. And pathogens. Right, pathogens. And plus, it's preventing the recharge of the aquifers, which we really, we desperately need, and we really want our aquifers to be well-charged here, and fully topped off as much as possible, right, to enable us to thrive during prolonged drought cycles, right? Yeah, and ideally what we would do, which we can't, we can't go back and retrofit it now, but ideally what we'd do is we would create these pervy, I never knew this word called pervious, but I guess if there's an impervious system, it should be pervious, right? If there's impervious surfaces to allow the water to percolate down into the aquifer, then we wouldn't be throwing away a very valuable resource that the Board of Water Supply needs for the future. Yeah, I was, I was reading somewhere that just simply the difference between having the native vegetation versus the albizia trees makes a tremendous difference in terms of native vegetation really would catch more and retain more of the water as it relative to the albizia trees, which flow a lot of it through and a lot of it runs off on the surface. Yeah, the albizia trees are a real problem because if you go up to any of the valleys and you look at the, there's albizia everywhere. In Minoa Valley, you look at that Paradise Park and if you drive up toward Paradise Park, if you look over on the eastern side of the valley, you can see all these, some albizia trees that have been killed, but they're, it's a very soft wood and it falls and it grows a canopy so it doesn't let anything grow underneath. This, this is great. We're going to explore this much more deeply, but right now we're going to have to take a quick break. My cabinet from the Social Sciences Research Institute is here with me. Ethan Allen, your host of Likeable Science. We're talking about the Alawai Watershed partnership and how to, how to preserve the Alawai. We'll be back in one minute. Hey, hey, baby, that's you. I want to know, will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone and I'll be your host, RB Kelly. See you there. Hello, I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair. I have a show called Finding Respect in the Chaos. It's all about women's rights and gender equality. It's a place for survivors of abuse to come on and tell their stories and a place for advocates to come on and share important resources so that people can get past the abuse and into the hope and healing that's on the other side. I hope you'll join me every other Friday at three o'clock for Finding Respect in the Chaos. I'm Cynthia Lee Sinclair on thinktecawaii.com. And you're back here on Likeable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, on Think Tech Hawaii. With me today on Think Tech Studios is my cabinet from the Social Sciences Research Institute at UH. And we're talking about the Alawai Watershed partnership. We're now, I guess, called the Collaborative. Collaboration. It's a group of organizations that have come together. It's an increasingly large group, I guess, which is great. All recognizing that there's a lot of different vested interests in trying to both mitigate flood damage in the region and really improve the overall health of the island through better ways of dealing with the water that falls here on that section of the Ahupua. So you pointed out there was an initial proposal a decade, 15 years ago, by the Army Corps of Engineers. A lot of people didn't like it. They didn't see it as comprehensive enough. Well, the one, the study was just finished. It was last, end of last year was when it went, or in August last year is when the latest proposal. But I mean, there are proposals that go back to 1998. Okay. And some, a lot of the ideas have been recycled. But the core narrowed their focus to just preventing the once in a hundred year flood. Right. But the issues are much bigger as we talked about. There's economic interests, political interests, ecological interests, environmental interests, all kinds of different reasons we want to look at this problem more holistically. Again, it's a very, the popular term these days is collective impact. Yeah. It takes a lot of different stakeholders with a lot of different interests, but all coming together and being able to say, here's where we have some common ground. We're all going to agree on some common goals, some common ways of seeing how successful we're being and majoring our progress. And then we're going to take it to the same. And taking advantage of the things that are already going on. So for example, Eolani School has been very active in getting schools involved in looking at the watershed and actually doing citizen science, water quality studies and whatnot. And there are 23 schools involved in that effort. And then the Aloai Watershed Association, which has been around for a long time with Karen and I and others, they have had a Clean Water Act grant to do alien species removal and planting of native plants and trying to reduce the runoff into the streams. Absolutely. And actually the erosion that takes place on the banks of the stream. Yeah, it's a critical component, right? Yeah, exactly. So taking advantage of all the things that people are, and there are a bunch of things like DLNR is going to be dredging the canal sometime in the near future. They're supposed to, I was supposed to do it, I think it was every five years. They haven't done it for a decade. But that, they've just finished an environmental impact statement to move ahead with that. And then there's, there have been proposals to put a bridge across, a pedestrian bridge across the Aloai. That's percolating along. And there have been a lot of proposals to make improvements in what, and I mentioned before that there's a proposal to establish a Watershed Improvement District similar to the Business Improvement Districts that had been fostered by the Waikiki Improvement Association. And so we've got, we've got Baker Mackenzie now, a consulting firm, who's looked at Watershed Management stuff around the country. And they're now looking with, we have them under contract with support from the Hawaii Tourism Authority to do an assessment of the options for establishment of a Watershed Improvement District, but also a community investment vehicle. And it's how can we do public-private partnerships to do a lot of the good things that everybody wants done in the Watershed? Right, but nobody wants to pay for individuals. Right. You might be willing to chip in a little bit for them, and that's sort of then the trick of the matter, right? Is to get enough of the people chipping in and off each. Sort of like stone soup. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And it's really, it's an effective way to get stuff done. Or maybe the only way to get things like this done is when you don't have one overriding authority who can sort of say, here's what we will do, we will do it, and here's the money for it. Right. If you've got to just take over it, we'd be fine. So, yeah. So what is, what's sort of on the drawing board then in terms of projects? Well, the, that feasibility, the option study and the financial and legal analysis report is due, the pre-liminary report is due today. And so we'll be looking at that over the next couple of months. And, you know, Iolani School is taking the lead on the community involvement in education. We have three working groups, Policy, Finance and Infrastructure, and that's, I co-chair that with the head of the Waikiki Improvement Association. And then there's the Environmental Quality Research and Science and the folks at the university are involved in that one. And then the culture education and community engagement is being led by camp schools and by Iolani School. Excellent. And it's, we're trying to make the whole thing kind of grounded in Hawaiian culture and spirituality because it's been really clear to a lot of people that this, this is a sacred ground. I mean, it's, and it's important that we, that we do keep the Hawaiian culture and whatnot in the forefront on this. And right, Hawaiians before the advent of the Europeans were supporting a population roughly equal to what ours is today without any of the technology that we have. So they obviously knew something about running their water systems correctly, right? Yeah, and it's really, we're trying to take a whole approach to this whole thing. And it's, you know, with the fact, recognizing the fact that there's been so much change in terms of the, the, the topography and the vegetation and everything else. Cover over huge, paved over land. It built buildings, all of which are impervious and run off water. You've got to do something with that water from that area. Right. But ideally we can figure out better things to do rather than just dump it into channels and send it directly out into the. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like flushing a resource down the toilet in a way. Not really. The other, the other thing that's playing is the fact that sea level rise is going to exacerbate all this. Right. I mean the. Which is the water table up. Well, and it also covers up the outflows from the, from the storm water systems. Right. So at some point we're not going to be able to just pipe our water out into the ocean. We're going to have to probably pump it out. So that's, that's kind of in the offing and we're pretty aware of that. All the more reason, right, to keep more of that water. Yeah. On the Hylians and let it soak in. So we don't have to get rid of it. Right. Because pumping out is going to be hideously expensive and difficult and all it's going to do is ultimately come back to us whenever storm surges. Right. Come in. So yeah, that's, that's all right. You know, after getting involved in this for a while my wife and I went back to that. She wanted to see where I grew up. So I took her back to New Jersey. I went down to Jersey shore and, you know, a year and some months after they were still bulldozing sand out of the streets of Jersey shore towns. And it was just a real mess. And Michael Bruno at the university, who's in, Michael was at Stevens Institute of Technology and he helped New York and the cities that were affected by Sandy think about what they want to do going forward, including keeping water out of the subway. Right. But, and, you know, for the Jersey shore communities, what they had was they had storm surge coming two ways. They had it coming from the bay and it had it coming from the ocean. Right. And that's likely to happen in Waikiki. Right, because yes, it's going, the water's going to come down the hill at the same time. It's coming in from the ocean and when those meet here, that could be a wet situation for Waikiki, right? Yeah. And, you know, the climate change commissions that are working at the state and the county level, they're starting to look at what sea level rise is going to mean for all of this stuff. Sure. Chip Fletcher has these wonderful projections of what a certain amount of sea level rise would look like and he's imposed that on maps of Waikiki and suddenly Waikiki turns into a set of small islands, which is a little frightened to think about. Chip has said climate change has changed a guy who was a coastal geologist's word about beaches to a freshwater hydrologist worried about flooding. That's a good one, right? Yeah. Very true. I mean, it's suddenly the balance becomes... It's changed. Yeah. I don't know. That's incredible and it's great to hear this is growing, it's been going on now, you're getting more people involved, there are more groups involved, more interest, hopefully more funding, more a broader array of experts involved. Yeah. And it's been very heartening because we've got to, we have a contract from... And it's been very heartening because we've got to, we have a contract from... And Enterprise, the Oahu Economic Development Board is the fiscal sponsor for all of this. Right. And Hawaii Green Growth has come in, its fiscal sponsor is Oahu Economic Development Board. And they've taken over sort of management of hurting the cats on this whole thing. Excellent. And Celeste and Julius. Julius is the project officer for them and he's doing a great job in kind of getting everybody involved. And... It should be more like school than a fish instead of hurting a cat. Right. Probably. But it's... And you know, some... Like Hawaiian Electric has come in with funding and Oahu Economic Development Board has come in with funding and some of the hotels through the Waikiki Improvement Association. Excellent. And it's not just the tourism industry is worried about the tourism industry at all. It affects every sector here. Every culture. And the irony is... And Rick Eggett told me this, you know, there's more interested in cleaning up the water quality in the alloy than there is in preventing the flush. But you didn't say that, but there is a great deal of interest in cleaning the water quality up. And, you know, the dream is to make the alloy swimmable, fishable, and boatable. That's beautiful. Hey, before I let you go, I want to ask a completely awful old question. OK. Nothing to do with this. If you had your choice of having the superpower of being able to fly or be invisible, which would you choose and why? Probably be invisible. And why? Huh? Because then you can go and find out what's going on. OK. There we go. Well, thank you, Mike. This has been really very educational and actually very encouraging and heartening to hear that so much interesting. It's been a tremendous... It's very gratifying seeing everybody pitching in and some great work going on that everybody else is going to hope. Some of our viewers might take the opportunity to join on in and get their organizations involved or get themselves involved as foot soldiers in this effort, right? Good. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. And I hope you'll come back next week and join us again on likeable science here on Think Tech Kauai. Until then.