City officials said Monday they are taking steps to ensure essential services to 35 residents of Mapele Road after heavy rain washed away a section of the roadway, making it impossible for refuse and fire trucks to pass.

As a result, residents are being forced to take their waste to the nearest transfer station, more than 10 miles away, Deputy Environmental Services Director Tim Houghton said.

To ease the situation, city officials are putting a trash bin at Kahaluu Regional Park in a few days to accommodate residents who’ve missed three pickups, Houghton said.

The residents will also be asked to stick to their regular trash schedules, including green waste and recycling days, when placing waste into the bin.

To ensure that only the affected residents have access to the bin, the city will keep a lock on it and hand out keys to those who need it, Houghton said. Or the city might opt to use a combination lock, he said.

“It is not a public dumping facility in the park. We don’t want that to happen,” he said.

“We’ll deal with bulky items separately,” Houghton said. “I don’t have the solution quite yet.”

Mayor Kirk Caldwell said firetrucks are also unable to fit onto what’s left of that section of Mapele Road, so the city has worked out an arrangement with a property owner to create a makeshift bypass road that can be accessed in case of emergencies.

“We don’t want to announce where that land is because we don’t want other people to use it, also,” the mayor said. But the arrangement will allow the trucks to “be up there in the same amount of time that they would have before the washout.”

Ian Santee, deputy director of the Department of Emergency Services, said paramedics and emergency medical technicians from the Kaneohe station drove up and down Mapele Road Monday and determined it is safe for the 14,000-pound ambulances to travel the entire distance.

Caldwell said it will take at least several months for even a temporary fix or repaving of the road to take place, and exactly who will make those improvements is a complicated matter because it is a private road. That means, technically, the city is not responsible for its upkeep.

An ordinance states specifically that the city shall not install or maintain “curbs, shoulders, gutters, drainage facilities or similar infrastructure” along private roads.

“That area of road needs to be reconstructed,” Caldwell said. “It’s a question about who does the reconstructing of it and how you go about doing it.”

Generally speaking, when it comes to a private road, “the city will pave it, fill in potholes because we do garbage pickup … but we don’t have the authority, if it’s on private property, to rebuild the road,” he said. “We’re going to be reaching out to the state to see what they can do to help given there’s a stream and (other) issues.”

Caldwell noted that disputed roads are a major issue statewide. “We want to solve the problem, but we don’t want to put ourselves in a predicament where we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars improving private roads all around this island that need to be maintained in some part by the people who live on those properties,” he said.

Further delays could be caused by the fact that the cracked road is over a stream, which likely would require federal or state permits. “It’s complicated anytime you deal with a stream,” Caldwell said.

City road crews have placed barriers along the caved-in section of road.