Correction: A previous draft of this article misstated the amount of pedestrians take Waipio Valley Access Road per year, as stated by Chris Yuen. The actual number is 50,000 per year.
Nobody could agree on a middle ground during a community discussion Wednesday evening about the closure of Waipio Valley Access Road.
The sole road into Waipio Valley was closed Feb. 25 to nonlocal traffic until 2025 after a geotechnical study determined that the potential risk of a dangerous rockfall or road subsidence is unacceptable.
In a community meeting Wednesday about the closure, Mayor Mitch Roth said his intention is to work to reopen the road as quickly and safely as possible, but until then the road must remain closed for safety’s sake.
“This is not something that we wanted to do, this is something we had to do,” Roth said. “This has nothing to do with the … Destination Management Action Plan, where they talked about giving places time to cool off. This is purely about safety.”
Roth also apologized to tour operators, who are especially affected by the loss of access to the road, before turning the floor over to Steve Pause, Department of Public Works deputy director.
Pause summarized the geotechnical report’s basic findings, saying that the county is continuing to work with the report’s authors — Seattle construction company Hart Crowser — to develop a more comprehensive evaluation of the road and a plan to fix it.
“It could also end up telling us that there are areas that are not quite as bad as this initial investigation told us, and we may be able to open up the road sooner,” Pause said.
Following Pause’s summary, dozens of community members provided their feedback, with no single sentiment dominant among them. Residents praised and condemned the measure in equal measure, and alternative suggestions — many of which contradicted each other — flew fast and furious.
Chris Yuen, a member of the state Board of Land and Natural Resources — although he said he was speaking solely as a private citizen — said the report grossly exaggerated the danger posed by the road.
“It overstates the risk to pedestrians by about 280 times and … the risk to vehicles by about 100 times,” Yuen said. “This is a matter of common sense and basic math.”
Yuen said that based on the report’s estimates, one in 18,000 pedestrians in Waipio Valley will be killed by a rockfall. But, with 50,000 pedestrians entering the valley per year pre-COVID, an average of 2.8 people per year would be killed by a rockfall, which has not happened.
Yuen also said the report estimates that the road will have six rockfalls per year, which, in order to reach the predicted 2.8 casualties per year, would mean half of those yearly rockfalls would have to strike a pedestrian, something Yuen called almost statistically impossible.
On the other hand, Kwai-Chang Publico said he supports a temporary closure of the road not on the merits of safety, but on the importance of allowing the island’s natural resources time to “rest.”
Others who participated in the meeting worried that the closure of the road interferes with Hawaiians’ rights to have access to the ocean, particularly as other beaches on the Hamakua Coast, such as Kolekole Beach Park, are currently inaccessible.
Still others identified another reason to close the road. Waipio resident Iini Kahakalau said residents of the valley traveling the road every day have found the trip fraught with danger as they navigate a narrow road cluttered with hikers and drivers who don’t know how to accommodate traffic.
“We risk our lives every day not just on a sketchy road, but on a sketchy road with people who don’t know how to drive it, tourists and locals,” Kahakalau said. “My concern is, once the geological issues are fixed … the flood of people are going to start coming back, and that is still a safety risk.”
Testifier Brandon Lee proposed a solution that would allow limited access to the valley while getting the bulk of dangerous traffic off the road: Prohibit renting four-wheel-drive vehicles in the county.
“If you can’t have four-wheel drive, you can’t go to certain spots,” Lee said. “If you’re able to go to certain spots because you’re part of a family and you have access to a truck or four-wheel-drive, then you can go to … many different spots that are four-wheel-drive only.
“Rental car companies don’t even want their cars to … go down these rough roads, so why even rent them at all?” Lee went on.
Tour operator Kyra Hannum recognized the danger posed by heavy tourism traffic, but urged the county to consider allowing some smaller-scale visitation in order to keep tour operators in business. But Waipio resident Ku Kahakalau noted that this would cause another problem: Tour vans carrying 15 people are extremely heavy and put even more strain on the road.
Testimony continued in this vein for an hour. In the end, Roth said the county will take public comments and suggestions to heart and use them to determine how best to manage the road going forward, but added that the decision to close the road for the time being has been made.
“I know that we have some people that disagree with the report,” Roth said. “Hey, get me some engineers that can talk to us. Right now, the engineers are telling us the safety factor makes it an issue.”
Public Works Director Ikaika Rodenhurst said the potential danger is not just to individuals but to an entire community. As the only access route to the valley, a catastrophic failure of the road will cut off the entire Waipio population from the rest of the island.
“We are doing this out of an abundance of caution and safety,” Pause said. “There’s a whole bunch of engineers at DPW and … at the consultant firm who are licensed, and the first and foremost thing in their mind is to protect public health and safety.
“We will work diligently with the community to remedy the situation as best and as fast as we can, but it’s unequivocal that what we’re doing is the right thing to do,” Pause said.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
