Chip Fletcher, the award-winning interim dean of the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean Science and Technology and an impassioned defender of Hawaii’s oceans and beaches, is as the saying goes, “one of the good things about Hawaii.”
Last week he was quoted in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser advocating for more thinking to be done about the relentless rise of Hawaii’s oceans.
Fletcher is pushing for a steady concern to be shown to recognize that Waikiki’s beachscape is changing as the ocean water rises.
Extreme high tides are
already occurring, Fletcher and others say, and this will lead to flooding in unexpected ways, such as water coming up through storm drains onto streets and waves flowing across beaches into buildings and roads.
It is now accepted that as the oceans’ water warms and the ice sheets melt, sea level has risen more than half a foot in the last century — and even if we stopped producing greenhouse gasses today, a very unlikely scenario, rise will only keep coming. The UN has warned that the accelerating pace of sea level rise threatens a “mass exodus.”
In a report by the Star-Advertiser’s Ian Bauer, Fletcher said that Honolulu’s water table rises and falls with the ocean’s tidal pushes.
“And the water table under Waikiki, and underneath most of the primary urban core of Honolulu, is only a few feet below that land surface,” he said. “It rises at high tide and it goes down at low tide, and with every increment of sea level rise, it gets closer and closer to becoming a wetland in our urban area.”
At issue in Bauer’s report is a City Council proposal to require hotels built along an oceanfront portion of Waikiki to have a structural inspection. The reason is to prevent tall buildings built on the waterfront from collapsing, such as happened to some Florida condos in 2021, killing 98.
City Council Chairman Tommy Waters is proposing that the issue be studied, while some in the hotel industry say they already inspect buildings and more study is not needed.
Speaking in favor of the inspections, Fletcher warned in Council testimony: “The bottoms of the roads are getting sapped by that water table. It’s a major reason why our buried infrastructure flexes with the tides.”
“Our buried wastewater pipes and our freshwater pipes are all flexing as the tides rise and fall in the water table under the ground surface, breaking joints, changing the stress dynamics of our buried infrastructure.”
Sea level rise is a problem that is not going to be solved, Fletcher said — it can only be managed, but before that happens, it has to be recognized and confronted.
The UH scientist has long urged that it is now time to recognize rising sea level plans and start to address them.
Action means not more study but real plans for identifying parcels of land to be saved from flooding, and hard decisions to be made for other property. It is time to get serious.
