Just two months after the Kona low storms, another potential disaster is playing out on the rural southwest side of Hawaiʻi island. But this time, instead of too much water, farmers and other rural residents suddenly don’t have enough.
Saturday’s 6.0 magnitude earthquake crushed and burst water catchment systems — large wooden and metal tanks that hold the rainwater pumped into homes and farm irrigation systems. The county provides very little water to the predominantly agricultural region and Corey Yeaton, owner of Pacific Blue Catchment, estimated that as many as 500 people could be without water.
KayLynne and Roy Santana, who grow coffee and macadamia nuts in Hōnaunau, got up to survey the quake’s damage shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday to discover one water tank collapsed and the other emptied out completely.
Since then, the farmers have been driving back and forth to a nearby public spigot, a free source of potable water provided by the Hawaiʻi County Department of Water Supply.
“We have little 5-gallon jugs right now, and we’ve just been going to the Yano Hall spigot and bringing it home to flush the toilets, and do little spit baths in the tub,” KayLynne Santana said.
Officials are still taking stock of the full extent of the damage. Farmers and other residents will slowly rebuild, but it could be months before they see any financial relief.
The timing could be worse, as the quake came in the middle of the region’s rainy season. The Santanas have been capturing the rain that has fallen since Saturday morning in a pair of 55-gallon trash cans. They’re not worried about their crops yet, but they will need to start irrigating soon if there’s a significant break in the rain.
Ten miles south, Linda Grimes lives and grows vegetables closer to the epicenter of the quake. She had two full water tanks on Friday. Then, mere minutes after the quake, over 9,000 gallons gushed across her property.
“The cement rim around the tank burst, punctured the liner and everything flooded out,” Grimes said. “It took everything that was under my house out into the yard, so there’s no water there for I don’t know how long and there’s a big crater under the tank.”
Her other tank is still half full, but the pump is broken. Over the weekend, Grimes caught rain in buckets.
Triaging And Taking Stock Of The Damage
The earthquake brought violent shaking and multiple aftershocks. Homes moved off their foundations and ancient rock walls toppled. It was 14 miles deep and felt throughout the islands.
By Monday morning, Yeaton had already received “well over 100” phone calls from Kona farmers and other rural residents.
“Most people’s tanks blew out catastrophically,” he said. Some tanks collapsed, many others had their linings torn. The linings are typically attached to the ground beneath the tanks, and they stayed attached while the tanks themselves, he said, “walked for up to a foot” in the quake.
Yeaton and the staff of WaterWorks, a Hilo-based water tank supplier, “put together an action squad” and spent most of the holiday weekend responding to shocked farmers and evaluating their tanks. They were triaging, with the shared understanding that kūpuna who have lost their only water supply should be first on the list.
Waterworks sent an emergency load of tank liners over from Hilo on Sunday, but Yeaton said they “fully expect that the island is going to run out of liners by the end of the week.”
Melanie Bondera, another coffee farmer based in Hōnaunau, said she and her husband lost all the water in one of their three tanks. On Sunday, she got on the phone and started calling neighbors — most of whom were in the same boat.
Bondera is concerned about public health in a region where adequate access to clean water is essential to keeping sicknesses like leptospirosis at bay. Over the longer term, she worries about the toll that replacing key water infrastructure will take in a community where each tank can cost tens of thousands of dollars and many farmers are over 65 and on fixed incomes.
In that way, the timing is particularly bad, she said, since many farms in the region were heavily impacted by the Kona low floods.
“We were just finding all the resources to help everybody, and there really isn’t anything for water tanks,” Bondera said. “FEMA probably won’t be appropriate, because they probably won’t make a federal disaster out of this, and all the farm agencies are going to consider this residential, even if it’s on your farm.”
At state Rep. Jeanné Kapela’s family’s South Kona home, a water main broke during the quake. She echoed Bondera’s concerns, saying: “It’s really rough timing.”
Kapela added that word about the water catchment problem took a while to get out because of the holiday weekend and the local graduation ceremony held on Saturday, which brought families back to Konawaena High School for the first time since March. Flooding from the Kona low storms had damaged 70% of the school’s instructional spaces and students had finished off the year learning from home.
“I don’t think — at the state level or at the county level — we have captured the full extent of what that damage looked like on Friday night,” Kapela said.
She urged people to fill out a damage report with the Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense Agency. Once the government has a tally, she said she hopes the county can access disaster funding through Aloha United Way and Vibrant Hawaii — the same groups that stepped up in response to the recent storms.
Talmadge Magno, administrator of the defense agency, said the agency had received 145 reports by Tuesday morning. Breaking out damage to water systems isn’t possible because it’s not a category in the questionnaire, although he said the agency plans to add questions about the loss of water systems and other utilities to the form moving forward.
So far about half of the reports the agency has gone through are for homes that were either destroyed or had major damage and Magno said he expects a majority of those “probably have water tank water system issues as well.”
The mayor’s office is working on an emergency proclamation due to the level of response and degree of damage that the defense agency has seen so far, Magno said. And while the agency hasn’t ever encountered this particular problem, he said it was already monitoring water closely during the recent drought — and the two scenarios have a great deal in common.
“It’s kind of just part of life on Hawaiʻi island, where there are so many people on catchment,” he said.
In the coming days, the agency will monitor the activity level at the spigots placed throughout the island and monitor the demand from companies that deliver water. If need be, Magno said the island’s public agencies will put out so-called water buffaloes — large trailer tankers — to provide additional water.
A County Where Access To Water Isn’t A Given
The rainy season in South Kona has become less predictable, but it typically lasts from April to October — a window that suggests residents would be smart to fix and replace their tanks as soon as possible to take advantage of the remaining precipitation.
But rather than focusing solely on individual farmers’ struggles to get back online, Bondera says the earthquake might also provide an opportunity to consider the value of expanding the county’s water infrastructure in the face of ongoing weather extremes. It’s an idea she and other farmers have raised before but have consistently hit a wall.
“It blew my mind at our community development meetings when they were like, ‘There is no plan, and there will be no plan to ever put water infrastructure uphill in South Kona,’ and I was like, ‘We can’t even talk about it?’ And they said no,” she said.
Chantal Chung, a former extension assistant for University of Hawaiʻi’s Sea Grant Program and the co-founder of a community garden and composting space in South Kona, said she spent years educating farmers about rainwater catchment. She sees reliance on catchment and the resulting lack of regulation as a double-edged sword.
“People are able to have a free hand in collecting their own rainwater, which is great. Water sovereignty is wonderful,” Chung said. But with that freedom comes a lack of support from the county when it comes to setting up and maintaining catchment systems.
Chung said she thinks the county should absolutely supply water to more of its rural residents, but, since she lost her job when the county cut funding for extension agents, she considers it unlikely that there will be funding to expand the county water system beyond its current footprint any time soon.
“There’s no lack of political will there,” she said. “There’s a lot of people that absolutely know it’s important, but it’s just getting there.”
In the meantime, Chung says the public spigots are definitely better than nothing. And, for the next few months at least, the ones in South Kona and Kaʻū are likely to get quite a bit of use.
This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
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