Battle Over Water in Rain-Soaked Paradise

Sumner Erdman grazes his cattle on the wide slopes of southwestern Maui, where pastures normally get 32 inches of rain a year. But last year was so dry that his cows trampled down fences to get to water; their calves were thin and thirsty. Standing here, Erdman can look across the valley to the mountains, where there’s so much water--almost 500 inches annually--that it seems to hang suspended in the air. From his vantage point, it is easy to see why this island, in many people’s minds a rain-soaked tropical paradise, is bracing for a water war.

There is in fact plenty of water on Maui, hydrologists say. But it’s not in the right place. Two decades of booming construction and tourism in central and southern Maui have heavily drawn down the main aquifer. And it will take even more water--10 million gallons more a day--over the next two decades to serve the projected new homes, golf courses and condominiums.

So county officials are looking to plentiful aquifers on the other side of the island. But a $49-million plan to build wells and pipelines in eastern Maui has been tied up in a court challenge. Conservationists fear it will damage streams in some of the island’s loveliest rain forests; small farmers and longtime residents complain that the plan will pump much-needed water out of their neighborhoods and ship it to the other side of the island to benefit powerful land developers.

Meanwhile, folks like Erdman complain that they’ve watched the county spend millions delivering water to new commercial developments while their own lines run dry. “The problem Maui has right now is trying to come to some sort of middle ground on [development]. We’re very far from getting there,” he said.

In the high-altitude communities near Kula, above central Maui, some residents have been waiting more than 10 years for reliable water supplies. Elliott Krash and her neighbors have had to install a private system that pumps water from below at significant expense; many nearby residents have only low-quality water or very low pressure.

“There are more than 800 people on the list” who are waiting for reliable water supplies, Krash said. At a recent meeting to decide how some newly available supplies might be apportioned, she said, “there were people in tears. People yelling and screaming. People who stood up and said, ‘My father died waiting for this water.’ ”

Increasingly, critics are demanding a complete accounting of the available water for this island of 117,600 residents. Maui is facing one of the highest growth rates in the state, but it has never conducted a sophisticated study of how much water it has--or even how much is being pumped out of the ground every day.

“We’re already using more than a million gallons a day more [in central and southern Maui] than we’re responsibly supposed to take out of the ground,” said Jonathan Starr, a member of the Maui Board of Water Supply. “There’s no management. It’s like the wild, wild West.”

Agriculture always has had first dibs on water on Maui, home to Hawaii’s last big sugar cane plantations. The East Maui Irrigation Co., the water arm of the powerful grower and developer Alexander & Baldwin Inc., controls 85% of the surface water available for development. The company diverts about 160 million gallons a day out of the eastern rain forests and streams and into its sugar cane fields under a leasing contract with the county. By contrast, the county delivers only 35 million gallons a day to island residents.

The company gradually is converting many of those fields to commercial development, including a world-class resort at Wailea--a community that looks like a tropical wonderland but is built on arid land that sprouts cactus when it’s not watered.

County water officials say predictions of water shortfalls that have come with such growth are premature. They can meet future demand, they say, but it will take substantial investments in wells and pipelines.

“What we’ve basically been trying to do over the last 10 years is to catch up with the fact that no additional water was developed during the 1980s, and that was a really high growth time,” said David Craddick, water supply director. “We have the ground water availability.... The problem is, the water is not where the people are.”

For years, Maui has relied on water from the large Iao aquifer under the central part of the island. But demand increased by nearly 750,000 gallons a day each year over the last decade, although it has slowed a bit in the last couple of years.

In 1980, the island was pumping 9.7 million gallons a day out of the aquifer. By 1996, that figure had doubled to what the U.S. Geological Survey determined was the aquifer’s maximum sustainable yield.

Bill Meyer, who recently retired as USGS regional director, said the agency came to realize that, even at the usage level considered sustainable, the aquifer was falling so much that salt from the surrounding seawater was making its way in.

The county since has eased back to 18 million gallons a day.

The federal government’s aquifer yield estimate is crucial in determining who controls the water. If the county pumps too close to the maximum, state law provides that the state water commission will come in and manage the aquifer. (Meredith Ching, Alexander & Baldwin’s vice president, recently was named by Gov. Ben Cayetano to the panel. Conservationists who have petitioned for state control say they cannot imagine a scenario under which Ching would favor granting the state substantial new oversight over Alexander & Baldwin’s water usage on Maui.)

One thing almost everyone can agree on is that if Maui is to meet the needs of future development, officials will have to look beyond the Iao aquifer. The proposed wells in eastern Maui should easily deliver that amount. But critics say the project is compromised by the surface water already taken by East Maui Irrigation.

Through an elaborate, 75-mile-long network of irrigation ditches--considered one of the engineering marvels of the world when it was completed in 1923--the water is collected from all over eastern Maui and carried to the sugar plantations. Conservationists fear that pumping out the ground water below the streams will leave the waterways too dry to recover.

“Many of these streams are already diverted three or four times” as they flow down the watershed, said Lucienne de Naie of the citizens group Maui Tomorrow. “We’re asking an awful lot out of our streams. Where I live, there’s now hardly any natural water at all, except for when it’s pouring rain.”

But Garret Hew, director of East Maui Irrigation, said the company diverts only about 15% of the water in the streams. “Hawaii has a lot of flashy streams, so when it rains, it pours, and our system can only take so much. We have streams in east Maui that produce billions of gallons when it’s raining, and the rest goes straight into the ocean,” Hew said.

An environmental impact study conducted by Maui’s Department of Water Supply backs that up. It says there is no connection between the ground water and the six major streams in eastern Maui, except very near the coast. “To sustain the argument that pumping from [the aquifer] will affect stream flow, it must be shown that the water table is intersected by the stream channels,” the report said. “This cannot be done.”

But Ed Wendt, who grows the traditional Hawaiian crop of taro in eastern Maui, said he and his fellow farmers have seen dozens of streams dry up.

“There are perennial streams, and right now there’s no water coming down them, or very little,” he said. “You talk about the scenic beauty of waterfalls, and they’re diverting an outrageous amount of water from them.”

John Minn, the county’s planning director, said the island is in the middle of a long-range planning effort that will look at water supply as a critical component of growth.

“We really need to look at the whole island and provide a more integrated and cohesive set of policies,” he said. “There are challenges to our water system, there’s no question about it.”

High up in the central mountains one recent day, water officials tramped through the dense rain forest above the county reservoirs. The air was thick with a constant drizzle, and water poured in rivulets down the slopes and through the ferns.

“It seems like it’d be enough, huh?” said Mike Faringer, a water treatment plant operator, as he stood in the mist. “But water isn’t the issue. Development is the issue. That’s the reason they need more water.”