The strip of sand that goes to make up the famous Waikiki beach seems to be disappearing very fast.
Our last kona wind has taken almost all of the beach in front of the larger hotels, which is not so good, just at the beginning of the tourist season.
During the past four years there have been a number of writeups in the local papers on … how to make the beach better, or to preserve what we now have.
Unfortunately Waikiki has not a background or reservoir of sand to draw from. What sand there is comes from the grinding process on the reef, which is a very slow process; therefore, it becomes necessary to build an artificial structure to break the current that carries the sand away.
(Note: Local engineers who have studied the problem expect the beach to be restored when trade winds return and the normal process of sanding shifting in from the reef is renewed.)
Many years ago there was a channel dredged through the reef in front of Fort DeRussy, and connected with the one through the yacht basin on to Kewalo basin. The sand that made the beach in the old days has been carried into these channels by this lateral current, and it will not come back.
The rough sketch is about the only way that this current can be checked, thereby allowing the sand from the reef to collect on the shoreline and remake the old beach.
This plan is based on the past four years’ observation of a man who has lived and bathed for the past sixty five years on the nineteen beaches in the east, west, and gulf coasts of the mainland.
This plan of jetties will cost a lot of money, but will pay for itself in the end, that we will have a beach for people to use and enjoy.
The board of “Cornfield Engineers,” sitting under the banyan tree, has decided that something must be done soon to keep the bathers out from under their feet, there being no clean sand for them to sit on.
After the jetties were built, clean white sand could be brought in from some point on the O.R.&L. in dump cars, between twelve midnight and five am., and dumped off the causeway and Kuhio park; about 2,000 carloads of ten or more yards each.
