Two years ago today the island woke to the terrible news that the Ka Loko Reservoir Dam had breached, sending a wall of water down a narrow watershed taking with it seven lives. Kilauea residents Bruce and Cyndee Fehring lost
Two years ago today the island woke to the terrible news that the Ka Loko Reservoir Dam had breached, sending a wall of water down a narrow watershed taking with it seven lives.
Kilauea residents Bruce and Cyndee Fehring lost their daughter Aurora Fehring, her husband Alan Dingwall and their 2-year-old son, Rowan Fehring-Dingwall. Four other people living on the Fehring property perished as well: Christina “Sunny” McNees, who was 8-months pregnant, and her fiancé Daniel Arroyo, who were to be married the weekend after the breach; Wayne Rotstein who was in the process of opening a business with the Fehrings; and Tim Noonan, a friend who was brought under the wing of the family.
The human loss would be followed by a heart-rending investigation into that which permitted the breach of an earthen dam resting on private property where inspections, upkeep and management fell to the state and an irrigation company. The county of Kauai was implicated as well for allowing the landowner to carry out illegal grading prior to the breach.
Within the first year after the breach, Attorney General’s office special investigator Robert Godbey produced a thorough, independent report revealing, among other things, that a county inspector, in the late 1990s, knew of illegal grading by the landowner James Pflueger. When the inspector alerted the county to the grading, then-Mayor Maryann Kusaka told the inspector not to be concerned.
It was discovered the Department of Land and Natural Resources, responsible for inspecting dams in the state, had never inspected the Ka Loko Dam. The Kilauea Irrigation Co., it was discovered, did not monitor flows into the reservoir through the Ka Loko Ditch, despite weeks of heavy rain.
It was further learned that Pflueger, with his grading, had filled in the spillway of the dam. The spillway allows pressure on a dam to alleviate when levels are too high. Pflueger’s neighbor Mike Dyer saw that the spillway had been covered over by the grading and attempted to tell his neighbor of the danger. Dyer also sent documentation of the covering of the spillway to the DLNR. He received no response from Pflueger or the state. Pflueger has said he never received such documentation. The state has since had the documentation provided to it a second time by Dyer after the breach, to be used in the investigation.
The Godbey report states that overtopping of the dam as a result of the covered spillway was most likely the cause of the breach. A failure to monitor or manage levels of the reservoir was cited as contributing to the breach as well.
The 100-year-old earthen dam was originally built in response to a robust sugar industry late last century. As that industry slowly faded into the pages of history, oversight of its remaining waterworks was spread among several entities, leaving responsibility of upkeep to a network of private landowners, irrigation companies and districts and state agencies that hardly communicated about such subjects.
After the breach, those same entities learned just how little communication there was pre-March 14, 2006.
The DLNR and the Army Corps of Engineers, as a result of the breach, immediately inspected every dam in the state. An underfunded DLNR was supplied money and manpower to better address the issue of dams and reservoirs throughout the state. The status of every dam in the state was quickly documented.
A good portion of the year 2009 has been set aside to adjudicate the lawsuits that have been filed over the breach. Those lawsuits involve the state, Kaua‘i County, the Fehrings, Bette Midler and Kilauea Irrigation Co., among others.
Bruce and Cyndee Fehring have grown the Aurora Foundation from an effort to supply blankets to underprivileged children near the Thai/Burmese border into a full-blown movement that has funded a single mother’s home and a health center on the project property with a nurse practitioner and a medic. The Fehrings started the foundation as a response to their grief after losing Aurora. Bruce said his daughter had a soft spot for the survivors of the December 2004 tsunami that affected the region.
The Fehrings will spend today in a low-key family gathering with their sons Dylan, Kai, and Galen. Their daughter Brianna had to stay on the Mainland, unable to get away from school.
Bruce recently suffered a heart attack and said he will be happy to be with his sons and wife on this day of remembrance.
As the memories of that day in March 2006 fade, exactly who will be held accountable may not be known for at least a year, and perhaps many more.
