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Ilnflversity Te~rac~ <br /> Scott L Andrews <br /> 369 Nene Street <br /> Hilo, Hawaii r„ <br /> „ <br /> 2/6/04`,, <br /> c <br /> r- ~ <br /> _ l: <br /> I'm a member of the Hilo Bay Watershed Advisory Group. It is a part of the <br /> Statewide Watershed Project that is collectuig public input on the seven worst problem <br /> watersheds in the State of Hawaii. Peter Rappa, the head investigator on this project says s <br /> that Hilo Bay fails the water standards by the EPA and the state Department of Health_ <br /> My concern is the pollution of Hilo Bay. <br /> We have had recent flooding in this area that contributed to the damage of down town <br /> <br /> HIlo and the soccer fields. Much pollution flowed into HIlo Bay from garbage, sediment, <br /> <br /> flooded out cesspools, and many other sources. I would like to quote a few excerpts from: <br /> (c) 2002 Environment Hawai i, Inc. <br /> Volume 12 Number 7 (January 2002) <br /> Hardened Banks, Channelized Streams Climb Ever Upwards after Hilo <br /> Flood <br /> Soon after the flooding, the county Department of Public Works asked the <br /> state Commission on Water Resource Management whether any of the <br /> planned projects might require a stream channel alteration permit from the <br /> conmussion. (The county was fined by the commission in the mid-1990s <br /> for failing to obtain a permit for construction of the Alenaio flood control <br /> project.) <br /> There's another odd characteristic about this youthful land: many of the <br /> stream channels, still in their formative years, are interrupted. Try hiking up <br /> the Alenaio Stream between Komohana Street and Kaumana Drive. A few <br /> hundred yards past Komohana the stream channel vanishes. By the time <br /> you pick up Alenaio just downstream of its crossing under Kaumana at <br /> Chong Street, the channel is again deep and well-defined -and goes under <br /> a different name: Waipahoehoe Stream. <br /> "You're dealing with a very young environment, geologically speaking," <br /> says Rick Fontaine ofthe U.S. Geological Survey in Honolulu. And, he <br /> adds, confounding the flow of water across the featureless surface are the <br /> "interconnections with lava tubes," a largely unmapped system of <br /> underground plumbing. <br /> "The hydrology and flood hydrology of the greater Hilo area are definitely <br /> complicated," he says. <br /> On the Map <br /> According to astate-maintained website on natural hazards, a damaging <br /> flood occurs on the Big Island every two years. But the averages don't hold <br /> ,~Wzl`,~ v ~ t <br /> ` ~omm. No. S <br /> ~ f~ef. To: <br /> 1 ' ~ 1 <br /> z , . I~ef. Date 4 <br /> <br />