The head of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources collected remnants of a floating dock system that mysteriously washed up near Campbell Industrial Park over the weekend and plans to turn them over to state health officials today to see whether they imperil animals or humans.
William Aila Jr. combed the beaches of Kalaeloa Saturday night, picking up pieces of plastic foam, concrete and wood after environmental activist Carroll Cox first found mounds of plastic foam and other evidence of a broken floating dock system coming ashore Friday.
"I realized that we weren’t going to get any (Health Department) guys or my guys out there" over the weekend, Aila said Sunday. "So I grabbed a bunch of samples to turn in to DOH."
Cox first saw a quarter-mile-long debris field offshore while hiking Friday.
"Then the water came in, and more and more (debris) drifted ashore," he said.
By Saturday, pieces of concrete connected to wood and plastic foam up to 4 and 5 feet long — among thousands of much tinier pieces — were spread over an area covering up to three-quarters of a mile, Cox said.
He saw seabirds chasing flying pieces of plastic foam along the beach and witnessed one trying to eat a piece.
But Cox worries even more about what might happen to humans and marine life if the plastic foam enters the marine food chain.
"It’s laying there leaching into the tide pools and floating in the moss and limu where a great population of sea turtles lives," Cox said. "(Endangered) monk seals haul out there, too. We don’t want it breaking down into the tide pool and humans end up consuming the fish at the end of the food chain. This can take 100 or so years to break down."
AILA, former harbormaster at the Waianae Small Boat Harbor, said the pieces of concrete, wood and plastic foam were clearly from a broken floating dock system and could be the remains of the floating docks at Keehi Small Boat Harbor that broke apart during the March 2011 Japanese tsunami.
But the debris also could have come from two floating dock systems at nearby Pearl Harbor, Aila said.
"It’s definitely part of a floating dock," he said.
State Rep. Kymberly Marcos Pine (R, Ewa Beach-Iroquois Point) represents a makai portion of the area around Kalaeloa and paddles in the ocean where the debris came ashore.
Pine said the debris that landed over the weekend represents a much smaller example of what could happen when Japan’s tsunami debris reaches Hawaii.
"We definitely need to have a state, city and federal response to any type of debris that is going to be washing ashore from the Japanese tsunami," Pine said Sunday. "Until we know exactly where this came from, we can’t really create a solution. But this is a warning sign that we do need to find a solution very soon to the Japanese debris. This is an example of what could happen, only magnifying it 200 to 300 times."
Earlier this month an assistant administrator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told a Senate panel in Washington that NOAA could not definitively say how much debris will reach U.S. shores or when.
University of Hawaii scientists earlier used computer modeling to show the Japanese debris had reached halfway across the Pacific and in 2015 would likely join the soupy debris known as the North Pacific Garbage Patch that swirls between Hawaii and California.
