Page 4 - MidWeek East - Jan 4, 2023

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JANUARY 4, 2023
The steep cliffs and flat flood plain that make Waimānalo so beauti- ful and bountiful also create flood hazards that have pre- cisely defined the shape of the many small subdivisions built just to the edge of flood zones.
STATE REP. LISA MARTEN
Laying The Groundwork For Flood Mitigation
State Rep. Lisa Marten (fourth from left) visits community sites in the Waimānalo flood zone with state partners and USACE engineers. PHOTO COURTESY THE OFFICE OF STATE REP. MARTEN
Much of the agricultural land lies within flood zones. When it rained more than 4 inches an hour in April 2018, waterways backed up, sending debris, cars and floodwater to damage local homes and farms. In De- cember 2021, heavy rains flooded a Waimānalo school
manage water flow better.
My office obtained a fed- erally funded Waimānalo Community Flood Hazard Study conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and sponsored by the State Office of Planning. The study looks at how much water is in the system and where it goes. Project engineers crawled
into 38 culverts and bridges to measure water flow capacity and sorted through a dizzying amount of historical data. It included information from four climate stations and four stream gauges, past Feder-
al Emergency Management Agency studies, recorded and firsthand descriptions of past floods, a former com- plex plantation irrigation sys- tem that left behind remnant ditches and two inactive res-
Even with all the data, there are gaps. There are no climate stations or stream gauges in the smaller watersheds closer to Kaiona, forcing the analysis to extrapolate from the wetter watersheds. Past human ac- tions, such as excavating the sand bar to increase flow, are not accounted for.
Do you have memories of water flow or flood in Waimānalo? Are you inter- ested in safety and land use? Contact my office to join the study report, which is expect- ed to happen later this month.
and community program.
If extreme rainfall becomes the norm, we want to take pre- ventive action. There is land that lies unused due to flood risk that could be converted into much needed homes or agriculture if we are able to
ervoirs, and a 60 million-gal- lon reservoir filled from the Maunawili watershed that provides cheap agricultural water to our farms through a network of closed pipes.
where it is light detection and ranging data collected by planes, but for the high ele- vations the analysis relies on lower definition satellite data.
The data on the terrain over which the water flows is ex- cellent at lower elevations
Contact Representative Lisa Marten (D-51: Waimāna- lo, Keolu Hills, Lanikai and portion of Kailua) at 808-586- 9450 or repmarten@capitol. hawaii.gov.
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