Kapaia washout repair to be long, costly job

As the rains diminish, road crews, some of whom had worked around the clock and more, continued their task of keeping Kauai’s roads passable.

Biggest problem was the cave-in that reduced the recently – widened Kuhio Highway at Kapaia to a dangerous one-lane passage.

Little hope for immediate repair was held out by State Transportation head on Kauai, Ed Nakano.

“This is not like repairing a bridge, we just can’t jump in and take care of this in seven days,” he said sadly, “It will take a long time and take quite a bit of money. We will have to find some way around the cave-in and we are working on this now.” Experts from Honolulu, specializing in soils and hydraulics, have been called in and will soon submit a report of how best to repair the road.

Cause of the cave-in was the collapse of the retaining wall below it, built in 1933 when, as Mr. Nakano explains, no mortar was used. Instead rock was piled one on another and they were expected to “stabilize… eventually.” It did, but after 35 years of wear and with the “over saturation” of the Thanksgiving week-end record rains, collapse followed. It had nothing to do with any failures in engineering or construction of the new road, Mr. Nakano insisted, but would have happened “sooner or later” anyway, perhaps when a heavy truck rolled over it.

“Better the rain,” he avers, “at least nobody was hurt.” Other problems which kept the highway men hopping, some without sleep from Friday night until Sunday morning, were mostly minor land-slides, clogged drains, and debris being washed down and tangling around bridge piers.

Hau bushes under the Kapaa bridge on Friday presented a “ticklish” job to remove without damage to the piers. Bridges at Hanapepe and Waimea also got jammed up and the men had to fight the rising waters to clear the streams.

Overworked drains clogged at Kalaheo on Monday night and traffic for   a while was routed