WAIMEA — The state Department of Land and Natural Resources, on behalf of Sen. Ron D. Kouchi, D-Kaua‘i, Ni‘ihau, and Rep. Dee Morikawa, D-16th District, is inviting the public to attend a meeting Wednesday in Waimea to provide information on
WAIMEA — The state Department of Land and Natural Resources, on behalf of Sen. Ron D. Kouchi, D-Kaua‘i, Ni‘ihau, and Rep. Dee Morikawa, D-16th District, is inviting the public to attend a meeting Wednesday in Waimea to provide information on a sand bypass program planned for the Kikiaola Small Boat Harbor in Kekaha. The meeting will also serve for the community to provide input on harbor issues.
Three years ago, in August 2009, the U.S. Army Corps and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources hosted a meeting at the Kikiaola Small Boat Harbor in Kekaha, in which local fishermen congratulated government officials for a “phenomenal job” in the first phase of a two-part project at the harbor.
At that time, the Army Corps was about to finish dredging a 700-foot-long, 205-foot-wide entrance channel at the harbor. The 11-foot-deep channel does a 90 degree turn, narrows to 105 feet at the entrance of the harbor, and then it narrows to 70 feet inside the harbor.
Additionally, a private contractor had finished reconstructing 835 feet of the main breakwater, making it 3- to 4-feet taller, with larger stones and a flatter slope to provide better protection from crashing waves.
Despite a general agreement among fishermen at that meeting that the harbor needed improvements, there were concerns with the removal of a finger, or spur, at the channel’s entrance.
“That finger was not supposed to come off,” local fisherman Clayton Kuga said at the 2009 meeting.
The finger was a 150-foot-long breakwater which was originally set in front of the harbor’s entrance, creating an inverse bottleneck for boaters coming in from the ocean. The finger offered some sort of a safe haven for boaters to wait for intervals in larger swells to venture out of the channel. The new, taller breakwall blocking the fishermen’s view of the open ocean waves just added to the potentially dangerous conditions, according to the fishermen.
Army Corps Coastal Engineer Tom Smith said in 2009 that after several studies, including computer models, they decided on removing the spur. He said the project envisions usage for the harbor for the next 50 years, and the wider entrance design is supposed to accommodate larger vessels.
But fishermen were blaming the finger removal as the cause of the sand build-up at the boat ramp in the inner harbor. On top of that, the wider entrance channel allows for swells to sneak into the harbor and bring waves up to a 11⁄2 feet tall, creating dangerous conditions, according to the fishermen.
For the second phase of the project, DLNR hired a private contractor to dredge the inner harbor, which was supposed to have begun Sept. 1, 2009, and lasted until February 2010. The private contractor was supposed have dredged the harbor to a depth of 7 feet.
DLNR Engineering Branch Head Eric Yuasa said in the August 2009 meeting that the dredging would only remove soft bottom from the harbor.
In case the contractor hit rock bottom, he was supposed to leave that area undisturbed.
In a press release Thursday, DLNR states the dredging of the inner harbor basin was completed in 2010, and the wooden marginal pier was also replaced during that project. Since completion of the project, DLNR Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation has received numerous concerns from harbor users and inquiries about what is planned for a sand bypass program, according to DLNR.
Future projects will include repairing the root of the west breakwater and implementing a sand by-pass program, DLNR states in the release.
Adding to all that, local fisherman Greg Holzman said in the August 2009 meeting at the harbor that community members in Kekaha kept asking him and other fishermen what did they do at the harbor that caused most of the sand at Kekaha Beach Park to disappear.
“It’s now Kekaha Rock Park,” said Holzman, adding that all the eroded sand could have been just a coincidence, but it was rather strange that the beach sand disappeared shortly after the spur was removed.
To this day, Kekaha Beach Park keeps eroding. County officials had to relocate the lifeguard tower at the north end of the beach a number of times, and Gov. Neil Abercrombie has recently signed a disaster proclamation authorizing emergency repairs to a portion of the highway running alongside the beach.
The meeting this Wednesday will be held at 5:30 p.m. at the Waimea Neighborhood Center, at 4556 Makeke Road.
Contact Andrea Kualapai at the main DOBOR office at (808) 587-0175 or Yuasa at (808) 587-0122 for more information.
