HONOLULU — The Navy said it spent $1.35 million to clean up munitions-related items from Ordy Pond, a 10,000-year-old limestone sinkhole on the old Barbers Point Naval Air Station that’s helped point to when Polynesians first colonized Oahu.
HONOLULU — The Navy said it spent $1.35 million to clean up munitions-related items from Ordy Pond, a 10,000-year-old limestone sinkhole on the old Barbers Point Naval Air Station that’s helped point to when Polynesians first colonized Oahu.
After the Navy used heavy equipment to remove mangroves choking the shoreline, water birds including the endangered Hawaiian stilt have been spotted at the 1.2-acre brackish-water pond, which is about 18 to 19 feet deep with silt and sediment below that.
The state has been trying to figure out what to do with it and two other parcels — one with a separate unique feature — that the Navy wants to turn over by the end of fiscal 2016 as part of the 1999 closure of Barbers Point.
The way ahead may be clearer for Ordy Pond. The Hawaii Community Development Authority, the state agency that will receive the parcels, said it intends to fence off the sinkhole for safety and allow continued research and access by organizations such as the University of Hawaii.
“Ordy Pond to me is a very unique parcel, and its value really is for research,” said Anthony Ching, HCDA’s executive director.
A 2014 study published in American Antiquity by J. Stephen Athens, Timothy M. Rieth and Thomas S. Dye said Ordy Pond “has some almost unique characteristics” in that coring samples can be used to obtain high-resolution chronological and environmental information dating to and beyond the earliest human habitation on Oahu. Using plant remains analysis, the authors concluded colonization may have occurred between A.D. 936 and 1133.
UH described Ordy Pond’s 44 feet of aquatic sediment as the “best-preserved, continuous, high-resolution Holocene sedimentary record in the Hawaiian Islands, and probably in the central Pacific.”
The northern and southern trap and skeet ranges — both of which were littered with lead and later cleaned up — are the two other parcels the Navy wants to convey to HCDA as part of a more than 200-acre deal.
Ironically, the northern range has the world’s only native growing population of Chamaesyce skottsbergii var. kalaeloana, otherwise known as the endangered Ewa Plains akoko, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Both sites were identified as having Hawaiian habitation features.
HCDA wants to put in solar panels on parts of both ranges — which would help offset an estimated annual $100,000 to $300,000 akoko preservation effort, Ching said.
Denise Emsley, a spokeswoman for Naval Facilities Engineering Command Hawaii, said the survey for munitions at Ordy Pond was completed as of October. Divers felt around in the silt at the bottom of the murky water to retrieve some of the items.