Awful roads
Mayor Mitch Roth: I called your office months ago and never got a response.
Last year, I called (on and off) for 1 1/2 years to the Highways Division about the potholes on both ends of the Waiaka bridge in Waimea, and a few times it was patched, but not often enough.
It’s a very dangerous situation, and I — and our town — think it should be taken more seriously.
We all pay the gas taxes, but we seem not to benefit from them. Our town is very small, and the roads are awful!
I’d like to know why we seem to be not on the Big Island map.
We deserve to have decent roads and the potholes filled as much as needed.
Holly Bell
Waimea
Obenski wrong about KCH
I tend to ignore Ken Obenski’s oh-so-wise observations about life on the Kona coast, but his “let’s just leave it alone” essay about Kona Community Hospital (WHT 4/9/2023 page A6) raises some important questions and, in my opinion, gives the wrong answers. I took a clue in the same edition’s NY Times crossword puzzle as a sign that I should respond: 81 down – “Stubbornly old-fashioned.”
Quoting Mark Twain’s description of Kona as “the Sundayest place you can imagine,” Mr. Obenski seems to ask: “why change things?” Simple answer: this place has changed significantly in the 157 years since Twain wrote his “Letters from the Sandwich Islands.” In a 2006 NY Times article, Hawai`i-born Lawrence Downes wrote: “Twain’s Hawai`i teemed with ship captains, whalers, missionaries, mosquitoes, fragrant thickets of flowers and thousands of cats.” Well, today’s Kona may have fewer of the first two on that list, but it was also a time when “modern” medicine knew of infection (thanks to a generation of doctors and nurses that had just gone through the terrible crucible of treating Civil War battlefield wounds), but lacked the tools to do much about it. Back then, a puncture wound from stepping on a rusty nail could be fatal; a burst appendix was a death sentence. When Twain waxed poetic about the rural joys of riding on horseback to Volcano House, there weren’t oversized trucks thundering down the roads or speeding drivers missing curves and rolling over with lethal consequences, as happened just last week on residential Ka`iminani Drive in Kona Palisades. Mr. Obenski may consider himself wiser than the medical professionals, but unless Kona Community Hospital is kept up to date, it could lose the certification needed to treat such urgent traumas. What might have been the outcome of his own “nearly fatal motorcyle accident” had he needed to be airlifted to Hilo, Maui or Honolulu for life-saving care? He is right: we would have trouble supporting a “500-bed hospital” and must be realistic about what politicians and taxpayers will get behind; but the West Hawai`i population not only needs, it deserves an adequately-staffed and equipped, modern emergency department in a hospital capable of administering local treatment of cancers, heart disease and other conditions that are becoming more widespread among our growing and aging population.
So, yes, the Kona Mark Twain experienced had its charms and some observations in his “Letters” are remarkably relevant today …but not when it comes to health care. As the ragtime entertainer and musicologist Max Morath was fond of saying: “the past is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”
Alan Silverman
Kailua Kona
