Don’t delay news of sewage spills

There’s something distinctly malodorous in the city’s handling of a recent sewage spill on vacant land near the Ko Olina Golf Club.

The city’s trigger for alerting the public about a spill is 1,000 gallons. On Nov. 30, when the Honolulu Department of Environmental Services confirmed that the spill at the West Oahu site had exceeded that volume, it issued a news release stating that much.

What’s stinky is that within some 24 hours, city officials knew that more than 200,000 gallons of untreated sewage had poured onto about an acre of land near the golf club, yet no updated news release was issued.

On Thursday — over one week after the open-ended notice went out and news reporters prodded for an update — Markus Owens, Environmental Services spokesman, pinpointed the spill estimate at 201,600 gallons and said the figure had not been made public sooner because first data gathered from the site had to be analyzed.

Regardless of analysis and whatever else, the city owes the public prompt updates.

In this case, emergency repair work — replacing about 16 feet of pipe after a break in the 20-inch force main — started on Nov. 30 and wrapped up the next day. An updated release or some follow-up notification was in order by Dec. 1, after crews had contained the spill.

Owens pointed out that there was no danger to the public as the spill — which occurred some 1,400 feet north of the golf course’s sixth hole, away from homes and hotels — “did not reach waterways and was contained to a confined, unimproved area.” While warning signs were posted, limiting information details to a heads-up alert falls short of public expectation.

City Councilwoman Kymberly Pine, who represents the area, is right to say that city officials should have notified the public when they got an approximate fix on how much raw sewage had spilled.

Pine called the incident, along with what appears to be an increasing number of wastewater breaks, a “red flag that something is wrong with the infrastructure” in the area, and plans to meet with Environmental Services Director Lori Kahikina this week to discuss the matter.

Indeed, the city has long struggled to keep its overall sewer system in proper working order.

In a 2010 consent decree, the city agreed to make more than $3.5 billion in improvements to its sewage treatment system by 2035. It was also fined $1.6 million for violations of federal and state law for spills, including a main break resulting in the discharge of about 50 million gallons of sewage into the Ala Wai Canal in 2006.

The decree is with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Health and three environmental groups that sued the city.

Each day, some 100 million gallons of wastewater from toilets, sinks and drains are moving through the islandwide system’s 2,100 miles of pipeline leading to nine wastewater treatment plants.

The Nov. 30 break was caused by corrosion to the force main’s external pipe. About 2,800 gallons were recovered, and the rest seeped into the ground. In mid-November, there were three accidental releases of sewage water on Oahu within a three-day stretch. Each exceeded the 1,000-gallon mark, with the largest spewing some 4,275 gallons onto Wahiawa’s Walker Avenue, with most of the flow entering a storm drain.

As the city continues its 25-year effort to upgrade sewer plumbing and construct secondary treatment facilities at the Sand Island and Honouliuli plants, main breaks and other accidents are bound to occur. When they do, the public counts on the city to follow notification with candid updates as they surface — even in cases of no apparent health or safety threat.

On the heels of every 1,000-gallon spill notice should be a reasonably quick update. Leaving the public hanging for more than a week — amid the less-than-fragrant whiff of curbed information — is unacceptable.