Kalaheo water meeting

Chief Engineer Kirk Saiki & Mayor Carvalho

I attended the community meeting about the water outage here: not a lot of new information but it was good to meet and get everyone together.

Repairs are expected to take about six weeks: most of that delay is time to get a replacement for the part that broke which must be custom made to order. Until repairs are completed all of Kalaheo is asked to voluntarily minimize water usage.

A lot of talk about people who do have water pressure being unaware of the restriction and over consuming. There are two holding tanks on each side of the highway and if you are near the bottom of the area served by a tank you have the best chance of getting water - on the high side if the tank goes empty you are first to lose service. Clearly the meeting was heavily attended by people who had lost water but it's the other folks who need to get the word.

"Connect-CTY" is the county's automated communications system they want everyone to sign up for. Lots of people who heard about it were unable to figure out the web site and it is hard to find and use. To sign up, click this and then click the "Add my contact info" button. You will have to fill out a form and go through another page (called CAPCHA). One problem I have had is that the system sends the same notice three times - by email, by recorded phone message, by SMS text - which is quite annoying.

While it is fine to ask people to signup for this notification service, this incident demonstrates it is not widely used. I would like to know how long this system has been deployed and how many signups they have. I suspect without more aggressively getting people to register it will be hard to reach everyone.

• Latest press release
• News coverage video

The unfortunate background of this problem came out a bit at the meeting that suggests that this may have been avoidable. January 29 the primary well failed and an emergency procurement request was prepared and approved by the water board in February but somehow work did not begin promptly. When questioned about the delay a county attorney responded explaining that "contract and bonding" issues resulted in a delay, and also mentioned that the contractor took "three weeks" to execute the contract and suggested the paperwork was not properly done. Nearly four months went by with no work on the well and then the backup well failed last week. Somehow once the second failure occurred the paperwork got sped up and within a couple days work on the primary well began. Exactly what happened was not revealed: possibly the months-old contracting delay just happened to resolve coincidentally or (what seems more likely to me) with increased urgency a fire was lit under whoever was slowing down the process. This meeting was not the time or place for investigating exactly what happened but in time we deserve to be told why nearly four months was insufficient to repair the primary while we still had backup, completely avoiding all of this.

There are voluntary restrictions being asked to limit water consumption to "essential uses" but I wonder how effective they are. Since they read meters monthly the department will get water usage numbers for Kalaheo residents and should be able to see on a customer basis. I would rather see a suggested amount of water rather than permitted and disallowed usages. If I use less water taking a short shower and washing some clothes that's better than using more water taking a bath. The county directive specifies "limiting" laundry but I don't know quite what that means. At the presentation they suggested using coin laundries in neighboring towns but I doubt they have the capacity for over a thousand households on top of the existing customer base.

What I was hoping to hear but did not was anything the department would do differently in future to avoid repetitions. 

• Faster procurement, approval, funding, contracting for emergency repairs.
• Better information about water outage and restrictions on use to mitigate the problem.

It was very heartening to hear several citizens politely thank the department for their efforts and urge the community to "pull together" and overall a good spirit of aloha was in force.