Glassy little waves rippled shoreward on a gray Tuesday morning at Waikiki Beach, where a state project to dredge and pump up to 20,000 cubic yards of offshore sand onto the beach kicked off with a traditional Hawaiian blessing by a barefoot Kahu Kordell Kekoa, who remarked with a smile, “We’re just going to help nature out a little bit.”
Orange netting fenced off a section of the beach where a bulldozer and an excavator were parked, and a small wooden boat sat in the channel between the surf breaks at Canoes and Queens, a few hundred feet offshore of the Diamond Head swim basin at Kuhio Beach.
In Phase 2 of a 2012 “Waikiki Beach Maintenance Project” that had moved 24,000 cubic yards of offshore sand onto the beach between the Moana Surfrider and Royal Hawaiian hotels, the boat was laying a pipeline from the offshore dredging area to the seaward end of the Kuhio groin, said Sam Lemmo, administrator for Office of Conservation & Coastal Lands of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
After the pipe was laid, a barge would anchor at the dredge site, bearing a crane with a submersible hydraulic pump that would suck sand off the ocean floor and pump it through the pipeline into the swim basin, where the sand would be dewatered and then trucked and deposited along the beach stretching to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
Meanwhile, plans are already underway for a new Waikiki Beach Improvement and Maintenance Program for the beaches stretching from the Halekulani and Waikiki Sheraton hotels to the Fort DeRussy groin. DLNR proposes to add more dredged sand and construct three T-head groins, plus add a “T” to the newly restored Royal Hawaiian groin, and is now “responding to (public) comments on our Environmental Impact Statement Public Notice (EISPN), determining what changes will be incorporated or not as we start working on a draft EIS,” Lemmo said.
Public comments, for which the period is now closed, included “a lot of support and a lot of suggestions, including why didn’t we include the Hilton Hawaiian Resort or Natatorium beaches,” Lemmo said, noting that the beach fronting the Hilton had become “rocky, with waves washing into the lagoon” but that “an EIS is very project-specific, and Waikiki needs a master plan that would include everything.”
The currently proposed program is not a master plan for all of Waikiki’s beaches.
Keone Downing, in comments submitted on behalf of Save Our Surf, asked “why this EIS stops short of addressing beach loss at adjacent local beaches at either end (of Waikiki) such as Duke Kahanamoku Beach and Kapiolani Park, the beaches which are used mostly by our local community.”
Instead, what the program was “really doing, is building a beach to those hotels that the public has very little access to because there’s no place to park for them,” Downing said in an interview Tuesday, “and the public, the taxpayers, are going to pick up the tab.”
SOS also had concerns, Downing added, about harmful impacts of the project to the quality of reef health and the endangered sea turtles “that historically have foraged in the areas fronting the Sheraton and Halekulani hotels,” and that the T-head groins would adversely affect Waikiki’s famous, shapely waves, including the surf breaks at Populars, Paradise and Threes.
In response to surfers’ concerns, Lemmo pointed out that the shoreline in the area, known as Gray’s Beach, is armored by a seawall and that, extending out from shore 200 feet, the porous, rock-rubble groins would drain and dissipate the waves’ energy, reducing the amount of backwash out to sea, compared with the current reflected energy off the seawall.
Downing countered that the groins might reduce the wave action at the shoreline but would bring the backwash action 200 feet offshore and that much closer to the surf break. “They’re armoring the shoreline farther out to sea, closer to the surf, over our reef system, all the things we should be protecting.”
The T-head groins in the currently proposed program, he added, were key components of a proposed 2007 Gray’s Beach project that was prepared for Kyo-ya Hotels, owner of the Waikiki Sheraton, and vigorously opposed by the surfing community, including Downing’s late father, the pioneer big-wave surfer and environmentalist George Downing. That project never reached the final EIS stage.
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