Get control of wild ‘floatillas’

How to describe the 10,000- strong “floatilla” off Waikiki Beach on the Fourth of July, with drunken minors, piles of floating trash, and a small army of rescue workers pulling hapless bathers out of the water?

“Way over the line,” said state Rep. Kaniela Ing. That sounds right.

Here and elsewhere, the growing popularity and uncontrolled expansion of social media-fueled “floatillas” — featuring offshore boozing on everything from boats to cheap inflatable rafts — have led to calls to clamp down on such parties.

That sounds right, too.

Experience has shown that once these events start growing, they eventually spiral out of control.

The once-peaceful sandbar in Kaneohe Bay, Ahu O Laka, a great place to picnic with a cold beer on a hot holiday weekend, devolved into a bacchanal.

Eventually, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) stepped in, enforcing a new rule banning alcohol on the Memorial, Independence and Labor Day weekends. It worked, and some normalcy returned.

However, offshore Waikiki isn’t a sandbar. The ocean off Waikiki Beach covers a much larger area than Ahu O Laka, a small area with manageable boundaries. Even if the state had rules for Waikiki similar to Ahu O Laka — which it doesn’t — enforcing them would be more difficult.

Weather conditions dictate where drunken revelers floating on inner tubes end up. This year, windy conditions on the Fourth scattered the bathers over a wide expanse, requiring more time to police the area, according to Robert Farrell, enforcement chief for DLNR’s Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement (DOCARE). Hundreds of people were caught, unable to get to shore on their own.

“From about 2:30 p.m. on it was continuous, just hundreds of people being transported back to shore … primarily by jet skis,” said Lt. Tom Allen, a Honolulu Ocean Safety official. “It’s easy to get out but coming back in, you get caught in the wind. It’s not a bunch of athletes out there.”

Indeed not. It’s one thing for a few unaware swimmers to go beyond the limits of their endurance and require rescue. But when hundreds of people to do so, many ignoring the obvious risks, it demon- strates an unacceptable disregard for the burdens they place on the public.

That includes city lifeguards, who no longer have limited immunity from civil lawsuits thanks to the Legislature, which this year unwisely allowed this protection to expire. They diligently performed their duties nonetheless.

It also includes those who have to pick up the revelers’ trash. The Coast Guard has better things to do than collect more than 100 abandoned inflatable floats, which it did in the aftermath of the floatilla.

What to do? Farrell suggested looking for lessons from San Diego, which faced similar issues with its own floatilla events. A city ordinance forbids “bathers” — generally defined as someone in the water who’s not on a proper boat or other marine vessel — from consuming alcohol up to 3 nautical miles from shore.

In the near term, DLNR could consider rules that would allow DOCARE to issue citations and fines for violators. While they would not have the force of criminal sanctions, stricter rules, properly enforced, could discourage some of the more outrageous behavior.

There’s also the Legislature. Ing, chairman of the House Committee on Ocean, Marine Resources and Hawaiian Affairs, who was alarmed by the Fourth of July fiasco, said he would study possible solutions.

The goal should not be to ban such events altogether. On a holiday weekend, our beaches, beach parks and other recreational public places are meant to be enjoyed — but not abused.

When abuse becomes the norm, it’s time to clamp down.