Rain Threatens More Hawaii Dams

At least two people are dead in Kauai's rugged hills after a century-old dam burst and released a thunderous torrent of water and mud. And with the rain is still falling, officials were closely monitoring the other earthen dams on the island.

In the Waita Reservoir, the water rose past 20 feet, just a few inches short of spilling over. A dam along the Morita Reservoir, downstream from the dam that broke on Tuesday, was under dangerous stress as well, officials said.

The Morita Reservoir "was pretty much the highest I've ever seen it," Tyler Jeffries of Wailua told CBS affiliate KGMB-TV. "Usually it's just a little stream running through here, with a little bit of water. You can maybe go bass fishing. It's like four feet out the whole way, but it was like 25, 30 feet deep yesterday."

The Army Corps of Engineers and national dam experts were inspecting both, and crews were using pumps to control the water levels at Morita. KGMB-TV reports that after working through the night, the pumps are beginning to lower water levels.

"Everybody's on edge," resident Victoria Stamper said.

Thursday morning's weather report brought more bad news for Hawaii's residents. The National Weather Service in Honolulu issued flash flood warnings for most of the islands. Radar imaging showed another area of heavy rain moving across the state.

The island has no comprehensive warning system to alerting people to the flooding danger or to get them out of harm's way when a dam break, state Sen. Gary L. Hooser said Thursday.

"The people now are very much aware of the problems," he said in a television interview, but "we need to implement a much better warning system."

Heavy rain had been falling for several days when the plantation-era dam along the Kaloko Reservoir broke early Tuesday without warning, releasing a flood of mud, water and debris that swept away two houses on the island's lush north shore and cut a three-mile path of destruction to the sea.

"Sounded like a 747 jet crashing here in the valley, all the trees popping and snapping and everything," said John Hawthorne. "It was just a horrendous sound, and it never quit."

At least two people were confirmed dead and as many as five others were missing. Paul Burns told The Honolulu Advertiser his sister, Kristina McNeese, was seven months pregnant and getting married Saturday. Her fiance also was missing.

A man's body was found Tuesday in a pile of debris a half mile offshore; searchers were looking as far as eight miles out to sea. On Wednesday, the body of a woman was discovered in a stream bed, said Kauai County spokeswoman Mary Daubert.

"From the air, the ground and even the photographs, the devastation is drastic," Gov. Linda Lingle said during a helicopter tour Wednesday.

Nearly all of Hawaii's dams were built early in the past century before federal or state standards, according to Edwin Matsuda, an engineer who heads the state's dam safety programs. Many date to the 1890s, when sugar plantations dotted the islands. Like the dam that burst, many are privately owned earthen structures.

Lingle said state law places responsibility for repairing and maintaining reservoirs on private owners but acknowledged that the state was failing in its responsibility to monitor the condition of Hawaii's dams, including the 60 on private property on the Garden Island.

"Are the 60 monitored on a regular basis? They are not," she said, adding that the state office responsible for monitoring has only one full-time employee and a part-time clerk.

Residents said new laws are needed that would give government ownership and control of all the reservoirs and dams.

"The damage that occurred is a result, not an act of God, but an inaction and action of man," said Linda Pasadava, president of the Kilauea Neighborhood Association, at a town hall meeting attended by more than 300 people.

"It was preventable if whoever took over after the plantation closed that they had somebody assigned to work on things like this," Kilauea resident Gary Pacheco told KGMB-TV.

In October, the American Society of Civil Engineers said at least 22 dams in the Hawaiian Islands had deficiencies that raised safety concerns. The society has been monitoring 130 dams in Hawaii. The dam on the Kaloko Reservoir was not on the list of dams rated "high-hazard" structures that could cause deaths and significant damage if they failed.

David Whatmore, who owns a 10-acre tropical fruit farm and uses water from the Kaloko dam, said at the town meeting that closing the reservoirs could harm farmers, especially during dry times.

"Right now, we've got plenty of water, but as soon as things dry out myself and a lot of other people risk going out of business," Whatmore said. "Our farms may go down the tube."

The dam was on the same property that Oahu auto dealer Jimmy Pflueger cleared without government approval, leading to a 2001 mudslide and $12 million in penalties and required payments. He has said he will appeal some of the penalties.

The work that Pflueger was fined for probably did not cause the dam rupture because it occurred on the opposite side of the reservoir, said Dean Higuchi, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pflueger already had begun making repairs to the area to stabilize it and limit runoff, Higuchi said. That work included returning streams to their natural course and planting vegetation to help stop erosion.

Pflueger said that no government agency had expressed concern about the reservoir of the dam in the past.

"The foremost attention at this time must be on those who are missing and the needs of the community affected," he said in a statement.