Letters to the Editor: 9-21-17

Homeless camp can’t go next to school

As a parent and active community member I am deeply concerned about the prospect of a homeless encampment being located directly next door to Kealakehe High School (within the School Safety Zone for schools). These particular homeless are known to have drug, alcohol and mental health issues.

Most do not wish to address or change these issues. At the current homeless encampment location they have stated that they have already had to remove multiple individuals for drug or alcohol offenses. This is concerning!

The police department is already overtaxed and understaffed and cannot ensure our children’s safety if the site is moved so close to the school. The high school is already doing its best to keep our children safe. Adding this additional burden is unacceptable and unconscionable to do to the school or the DOE.

This location is obviously not an appropriate location for a large group of troubled individuals. Perhaps a better location might be right next door to the county building, the police station or the old mini golf/veterans building at Old Airport Park.

Shani Dutton

Kailua-Kona

Wells, pumps, need to be looked at separately

All this talk about the water pumps, but what happened? How did it happen? All good questions and hopefully it will result in it not happening again.

What does worry me is the idea of drilling redundant wells. It’s an expensive and time-consuming option to which I have to ask the question, has the well failed? From everything I have heard, the wells are just fine, it’s the pumps that have failed.

These are two separate components and need to be seen as such. Putting in redundant equipment makes sense when you are looking at the rate or failure or even catastrophic loss that puts your service or business at risk. Wells do fail. They can run dry, collapse or become unusable from contaminants. Pumps fail from lack of maintenance, power surges, defective parts or they have exceed their service life (just plain worn out).

Both wells and pumps can be monitored and serviced to prevent most failures. And certainly a sudden failure is possible. However, in this case, I have not heard anything about the wells, just the pumps. It’s sort of like coming home and finding your house without electricity and deciding the best course is build a redundant house. Economically, as a percentage basis, it’s probably close, as drilling new wells is a very expensive option.

And the initial problem has not been corrected of maintaining proper parts, servicing, replacing older pumps and having redundant pumps. In closing, maintaining eight pumps is no easy task. Maintaining 12 pumps is even harder. Let’s fix the pumps, put in place safe guards to keep this from happening again. And let’s stop talking about making it harder and more expensive with nothing learned.

Steve Kaiser

Hawi