The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to break ground around November on a project to put in 7,000 more columbarium "niches" for cremated remains at Punchbowl cemetery.
The new niches would be where the public information center and administrative offices are now, and new offices would be built outside the crater on five acres of government land.
Officials with the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the only national cemetery in Hawaii, said Punchbowl would run out of interment space in January 2016 without the expansion.
"We’re focusing on the columbariums as being a solution to the veterans interment situation," said Nadine Siak, a Punchbowl spokeswoman.
Approximately 105,000 veterans live in Hawaii, according to an environmental assessment for the project. National estimates point to anywhere from 600 to more than 1,000 World War II veterans dying each day.
Siak said the project is going out to bid this week. She said another 5,300 niches could be installed at a later date on the slope south of the American Battle Monuments Commission memorial, where a sculpture of Lady Columbia overlooks cemetery graves. Each urn niche is 10 inches high, 14 inches wide and 20 inches deep.
A government solicitation estimates the cost for the project at between $10 million and $20 million.
A public information meeting to discuss the plan is scheduled for 9 a.m. Saturday at Keehi Lagoon Memorial Park at 2685 N. Nimitz Highway.
In February 1948 Congress approved funding for Punchbowl. The first interment was in 1949. There are about 33,500 in-ground burial plots and no more room for casketed graves — unless a veteran buried as an "unknown" is exhumed, identified and returned to family for interment elsewhere.
Some burials from the Dec. 7, 1941, attack and the Korean War have been exhumed and, in some cases, allowed the burial of Iraq and Afghanistan war casualties.
The existing offices and the information center, just inside and to the right of the entrance to the 116-acre cemetery, were built in 1949, according to the environmental assessment.
There have been no major renovations in 64 years, and the facilities no longer meet the needs of visitors and staff, the report said.
The new information center and administrative offices will be built on the northeastern exterior flank near the entrance road that leads into Punchbowl crater west of the intersection of Puowaina and Tantalus drives. The building will be accessed by a new road parallel to Puowaina Drive.
The plan is for the information center to be framed in glass with expansive views over Honolulu, with a "welcome mat" of cut stone resembling a woven lau hala mat.
Siak said the work is expected to be completed over two years.
