Michael Kumukauoha Lee gathers limu at One'ula Beach Park, where developer Haseko is proposing to discharge stormwater from Pāpipi Road and the entire Kalo'i watershed, from Makakilo down. - Photo: Courtesy of Native Hawaiian Legal Corp.

Protecting the limu
'Ewa Beach resident fights proposed
drainage projects on O'ahu's south shore

By T. Ilihia Gionson / Ka Wai Ola

Growing up in 'Ewa Beach, Michael Kumukauoha Lee remembers gathering limu with his 'ohana for food and medicine. “(Limu is) part of our cultural heritage that goes back to the Kumulipo,” said Lee. “Food and medicine are part of our heritage. The seaweed is needed for the fish. If the fish don't have limu to eat, they go away,” he said. Today, he says, two drainage projects planned within several hundred yards of each other by developer Haseko threaten the once-abundant natural resources of the One'ula Beach area, also known as Hau Bush.

Lee is currently party to two cases pending before the state Board of Land and Natural Resources challenging permit applications by Haseko to construct the Pāpipi and Kalo'i drainage systems with outlets in One'ula Beach Park, on the grounds that the contaminants in discharged water would hurt the area's limu.

The Pāpipi Road project is designed to help ease the flooding that residents there have been coping with for decades, said Haseko spokesperson Sharene Saito Tam. The roughly three-quarter-mile system is proposed to run from 'Ewa Beach Elementary School down to the ocean on land that Haseko will give the city to expand One'ula Beach Park.

The larger of the two projects is the Kalo'i Regional Drainage Improvements Project. “(The project) benefits the entire 7,000-acre Kalo'i watershed from the mountains above Makakilo, thru the agricultural lands owned by James Campbell Co., UH-West O'ahu, DHHL (state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands), D.R. Horton, and 'Ewa Villages,” said Saito Tam.

The proposed Kalo'i regional project will widen an existing emergency drainage channel running from flood-prone 'Ewa Villages to One'ula Beach Park. The system includes a series of open grassy areas to handle storm water as it flows through. Saito Tam said that a “significant amount” of rain would need to fall to fill up this network of retention/detention basins before the water would flow over the sand berm along the shore and enter the ocean.

Lee, represented by the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., says that the discharge from the drains will further destroy limu that has already been in decline for the past four decades.

At the center of the contested case are studies commissioned by each of the parties. A study commissioned by Haseko found that there would be no adverse impacts on the area's limu stock. The Native Hawaiian Legal Corp. also had a study done that showed that storm water discharges have significant detrimental effects on both the quantity and varieties of limu. Both sides find fault in the methodology of the other's studies.

Lee says that water percolates into the ground, minimizing the need for such large-scale drainage systems, as long as there are open areas in developments without concrete or asphalt. “I'm just asking that they leave the open space to deal with their runoff,” he said.