The black sand beach at Pohoiki will be almost entirely removed in order to reopen the Pohoiki Boat Ramp, engineers confirmed Tuesday.
During a community meeting Tuesday night at the Pahoa District Park Gym, engineers discussed plans to reopen the boat ramp and said the state will pursue an option to completely dredge the beach in front of the structure, instead of three other options presented to the community in August.
The ramp, the only boat launch point in Puna, was undamaged but rendered unusable during the 2018 Kilauea eruption when lava entering the ocean deposited sand in front of the ramp, cutting it off from the ocean. Since then, fishermen have had to travel to Hilo to access the water, at great personal expense.
John Katahira, principal engineer at Limtiaco Consulting Group, the Honolulu firm developing the reopening plan for the ramp, presented at an August community meeting three potential options for reopening the ramp. Two of the options included dredging channels of varying dimensions through the sandbar, while the third called for a channel to be dredged and dikes to be installed to shield it from the waves.
At Tuesday’s event, Katahira said none of the three options were superior to the others, and each had major downsides. The option including dikes was almost prohibitively time-consuming and expensive — estimated to cost up to $62 million — while the other two options, although cheaper, were not guaranteed to be permanent, with engineers warning that the ocean currents in the area could quickly redeposit sand back in the channel.
Instead, Katahira said Limtiaco has decided on a fourth option, which was formulated shortly after the August meeting. He called it the “dredge everything alternative.”
This alternative plan would not dredge a channel, but instead would remove 215,000 cubic yards of sand, which is nearly all of the beach. Katahira put air quotes around the word “everything,” and said some small portion of the beach would remain.
The sand would be placed on the “accretion land,” new land formed by the lava flow, Katahira said, and some would be used to fill in the “hot ponds” that had formed near the area.
This last announcement drew some murmurs from the audience, although some who attended the meeting were pleased by the development.
“You mean the stagnant, bacteria-riddled water … the Department of Health warns people to stay out of?” Puna resident Ku‘ulei Kealoha Cooper told the Tribune-Herald on Wednesday. “Recreation comes secondary to food sustenance. People are trespassing over other people’s property to get to them. There’s no toilets or running water there. Need I say more?”
Katahira said the new plan is estimated to cost about $36 million, but added that legislators already are working on finding funds. He also said the project could be put out to bid by next July, which is the earliest those funds would be available.
Katahira also said he will recommend to the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation that it establish a dredge maintenance program that would dredge the boat harbor every five years to ensure the beach does not reaccumulate. The program also would conduct annual surveys of the seabed to ensure it is not rising.
Cooper, who has been outspoken for years about the need to restore the ramp swiftly, said she was pleased with the new plan, explaining that the “dredge everything” option was actually a original plan proposed in 2018, but the funding problem was insurmountable back then.
“My biggest concern now is not the funding, but the time,” Cooper said. “Time is our greatest enemy. … We need to get our fishermen back in the water as soon as possible.”
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.