7-year stitch in line nears an end

Crews and divers started pulling a mile-long temporary sewer line from the murky depths of the Ala Wai Canal last week, seven years after persistent rain ruptured a Waikiki pipe and leaked millions of gallons of raw sewage into the water there.

The leak gushed 48 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Ala Wai over four days in 2006, closed some of Waikiki’s beaches and turned stretches of Oahu’s turquoise-blue South Shore brown — a sickly image captured in widespread media coverage.

The spill was also linked to the death of a man who fell into the canal days later, succumbing to a bacterial infection. Medical examiners at the time said chronic alcoholic liver disease also helped the infection take hold in the victim, 34-year-old Oliver Johnson.

The Ala Wai spill was the largest recorded in the state’s history and drew attention to Oahu’s aging sewer system.

The $42.7 million Ala Wai project to install a new fiberglass line is part of a larger, approximately $4.6 billion effort to upgrade Hono­lulu’s sewer network and treatment plants at Sand Island and Hono­uli­uli. Improvements are expected to take about two decades to complete.

A 2010 Environmental Protection Agency consent decree requires the city to complete the upgrades.

The city agreed to the order with state and federal officials after years of concern that Oahu’s deteriorating sewer network left the island particularly vulnerable to bad spills. Three environmental groups — the Sierra Club, Hawaii’s Thousand Friends and Our Children’s Earth — sued the city in 2004 after repeated spills forced closings of beaches, posed safety concerns and caused other problems. An even earlier EPA suit led to a consent decree in 1995 that also required major sewer repairs from the city.

The city was about halfway through a 20-year plan to fix Oahu’s sewer pipe system when the 2010 EPA consent decree was negotiated, said Markus Owens, a spokes­man for the city’s Department of Environmental Services.

So far the city has completed 305 of the 481 benchmarks set in the latest federal decree — all of them on time, Owens said. "We’re trying to stay ahead of the game," he added.

The city aims to complete a $5.7 million upgrade of 6,000 feet of sewer line and manhole repairs in Waikiki by September, Owens said.

By the end of August, workers should complete removal of the so-called "black noodle" pipe installed as a temporary sewer line after the massive Ala Wai spill.

A new, permanent, 5,800-foot-long pipe, installed about 40 feet below the surface along the length of the Ala Wai, will now serve as the primary raw sewage carrier from Waikiki and parts of McCully/Moiliili.

The new pipe is 72 inches in diameter, made mostly of fiberglass and expected to last 75 years, Department of Design and Construction Director Chris Taka­shige said. The line ends in Ala Moana Park, and the sewage eventually winds up at a treatment plant on Sand Island.

The concrete pipe that ruptured in 2006 was repaired and reinforced, and will also help run sewage from the area, he said.

The high-density polyethylene "black noodle" pipe was first sunk into the canal in July 2006, said James McCoy, a spokes­man for AECOM, the construction firm contracted to remove the temporary line.

Crews are removing it by drilling a hole in the 4-foot-diameter pipe and pumping the remaining sewage into a nearby manhole. The air that fills in the sewage’s place helps bring it to the surface, where workers then cut it up and recycle the materials, Taka­shige said. The entire pipe should be gone by the end of August, he added.