Isle sugar industry ceases as HC&S sends off final batch

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BRYAN BERKOWITZ / SPECIAL TO THE STAR-ADVERTISER

About 32,000 tons of raw Hawaii sugar was loaded Wednesday onto the Moku Pahu cargo ship before making its way to a California refinery.

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BRYAN BERKOWITZ / SPECIAL TO THE STAR-ADVERTISER

A bulldozer pushed a load of sugar Wednesday through the vast 80-foot-tall warehouse of the Kahului Trucking & Storagefacility where the sugar was stored before being sent off to California. About 32,000 tons of raw Hawaii sugar was loaded onto the Moku Pahu cargo ship before making its way to a California refinery.

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The last batch of raw sugar from plantation agriculture in Hawaii was due to sail off to the horizon this morning.

About 32,000 tons of the light brown crystals loaded into six holds of the 685-foot Moku Pahu departed Maui for the C&H Sugar refinery in Crockett, Calif., near San Francisco for the last time.

The sweet cargo was derived from the waning days of harvesting sugar cane at Hawaiian Commercial &Sugar Co., which ceased farming the crop this week after 146 years and marked the end of what was once an industry represented by more than 150 plantations in Hawaii.

HC&S is slated today to turn off its mill forever, and after numerous truck deliveries from the factory to a roughly 80-foot-tall warehouse at Kahului Harbor, transportation firm Kahului Trucking &Storage Inc. loaded the cargo ship using bulldozers and conveyor belts over about 40 hours.

Also on the vessel nicknamed the “sugar ship” is about 2,000 tons of molasses, a byproduct of turning sugar cane into raw sugar.

Honolulu-based Alexander &Baldwin Inc. owns both HC&S and KT&S and decided to quit farming sugar cane after declaring no hope of reversing a $30 million loss from the operation last year.

About 645 HC&S employees will have lost their jobs by the end of the year. The loss at KT&S will be nine workers, though the company has offset that by a couple of employees hired in other parts of the business, according to General Manager Glenn Wilbourn. Overall, KT&S employs 71 people on Maui, Kauai and Hawaii island.

KT&S has been growing in the area of repair work and parts supplier for heavy trucks to supplement trucking and storage over the last decade as demand from the local sugar industry, which included the 2009 shutdown of Gay &Robinson on Kauai, grew smaller.

Upon contemplating what KT&S will be like without moving small mountains of raw sugar for transit to the mainland, Wilbourn ran into a loss for words: “It’s good to look at what the next opportunities bring, but at the same time closing the book on this …”

Wilbourn joined the A&B family of companies 34 years ago as a heavy equipment operator for HC&S, and 11 years ago became general manager for KT&S, where typically the Moku Pahu shipped out with sugar five or six times a year. “It’s going to change Maui,” he said.

Sometime after the last delivery of sugar to the mainland, A&B is expected to auction equipment from its factory and sell other assets including the sugar ship.