Dirty water

The Department of Health has identified a moderate nitrate contamination problem in the groundwater Upcountry.

Most of us Upcountry get our water from the county, and most of the county's water comes from surface streams or from wells outside the zone of suspected nitrates contamination, so the issue is not about drinking water but about real estate.

I attended the Kula Community Association chalk talk last night, and the presentation was clear, precise and useful. I was on the Mainland during the original presentation which was criticized for not being any of those things.

The questions were also useful for the first five or six questioners until the obnoxious hotheads took over and I left. (When I was paid to go to this sort of meeting I had to stay for all the jerks; it is kind of pleasant to be able to walk off when they spout off.)

So here's the deal and what it means to you:

If you look at a map, the habitations Upcountry run from Kula San almost directly north and all downhill. There are about 10,000 sources of sewage and about 7,400 are cesspools, with the rest septic tanks or better.

Nitrates do not degrade in groundwater in the presence of oxygen. (In anoxic conditions, they do, which is why the pineapple cannery had to install pipes to vent the methane that was the end product of the slightly sugary wash water that it used to inject into the ground.) Health concerns for nitrates in drinking water start at 12 mL per liter, and no well tested Upcountry comes close to that.

However the health department takes notice when tests top 5 mL, which indicates some sources above natural conditions. Two wells, one at Pukalani Golf Course and one at the long-gestating Baldwin Estates project just below Haliimaile, have been tested fairly thoroughly.

They show nitrates at nearly 9 mL. Modeling  and spotty data from around the area suggest that there's a nitrate buildup in groundwater gradually as more and more units are feeding into it as you drop in elevation.

Although the department says it is not prescribing anything and is open to other approaches, it is clear that it has concluded that it would be simple and effective to skim off about a quarter of the excess nitrates by way of universal septic systems Upcountry.

Cesspools discharge their liquids about 15 feet down, too low for vegetation to take them up. Septic tanks discharge their liquids around 3 feet below the surface where a fairly large portion of the nitrates become fertilizer. That's the source of Erma Bombeck's book title,"The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank."

Converting 7,400 cesspools to septic systems at around $20,000 dollars and up per system is going to cost a great deal of money, although not as a percentage of the value of most of that real estate.

The problem is space. Although the department says it is not mandating changes, not yet anyway, about 25 years ago it mandated a huge change Upcountry when it designated most of the island is a Critical Wastewater Disposal Area. That meant new construction could not use cesspools. It did not require retrofitting. It effectively established the minimum lot size Upcountry at one-quarter acre, regardless of the county zoning which is not nearly as restrictive.

This hasn't created much indignation because virtually all the housing built over the past 25 years was luxury housing and none of that was on quarter-acre acre lots. It did affect a few older lots for people wanted to subdivide for their families but were prevented from doing so.

Septic tanks are easy if you have a quarter acre or better, but if you don't there is another alternative and that is waterless treatment of household sewage. There are numerous manufacturers.

It would take some getting used to for Americans to go back to waterless waste treatment but after all we didn't start having indoor plumbing until our great-grandparents' time for the most part. It could be done.

I have a long proposed that the county spend a couple hundred thousand dollars, buy four or five of these units from different manufacturers and install them in households in West Maui, Upcountry, Hana, Molokai and Lanai and see what happens.

The crucial area is not Upcountry but Wahikuli which is the real source of the degradation of water due to biosolids in West Maui and not the fabled injection wells which are not a problem. That's a myth flogged by the know-nothing environmentalists, and we are spending tens of millions of dollars to fix this nonexistent problem and $0 to fix the existing problem.

I've blamed Sen. Dan who spent a million federal dollars trying to get Wendy Wiltsie Ph.D. to convict injection wells back in the '90s. She couldn't do it because it wasn't happening and she was an honest enough scientist to put that in her report, although her public statements tried to obscure the facts.

The Upcountry nitrate situation seems genuine enough, and I was impressed by the solidity of the scientific study that was presented last night.

I happen to think that waterless systems will be easy, cheaper and hard to sell. I spoke briefly to Council Member Kelly King and it appears that there is a small, very small effort originating at the state level to perhaps do a demonstration.

She is attempting to get at the state money. I say pish. The county's operating budget is $900 million. We lose $200,000 in change in the sofa cushions in the County Council breakroom. Forget the state  demonstration.  We should just go.