Hawaii Public Radio
November 16, 2018
Transcribed by the Kaimana Beach Coalition.
Catherine Cruz: Let the battle begin.
CC: A new round over what to do about the Waikiki Natatorium has touched off a new alternative for a swim basin and a plan to replace a couple of crumbling walls with a fiberglass mesh. Former war veterans weighed in on the controversy over the weekend on Veterans Day against the backdrop of the War Memorial. We talked to two veterans who both remember swimming at the salt water pool when they were children. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Manchester shares his memories.
Curtis Manchester: My father and I swam in this pool back in the early ’60’s when I was a little kid and – so it means a lot to me and as a place for people to go to ’cause it was a war memorial and you used to have the cannons up front – it was a place where my father would spend a little bit of time, you know, when I was a young boy, and talk to me about what war was, what his experiences were in World War II, so I think there are very important roles for war memorials in our culture, in our society. This was a very practical one – it had a swimming pool, and bleachers that can be used for all kinds of things, there was even [a] possibility of putting a stage out there and having a concert, but that didn’t happen this year. So they have this role of connecting up with the past, of being a place for families to talk to their children. I know some people where the only place their father would talk to them about their war experience, or their mother, was when they went to a memorial like this and then it was something that brought up these issues.
CC: Manchester hopes whatever is decided it is appropriate for the memorial. And John M. Cummings Jr. said he loved jumping off the pool tower and recalled watching elite swimmers from the U.S. and Japan go head to head.
John Cummings: They called ’em the “Flying Fish”. Nobody could [beat them].
CC: And so, I know that there’s all this discussion about what happens to the future of the Natatorium and the arch…
JC: This place is destroyed already. They didn’t do nothin’. I feel [sorry]. I don’t feel happy about it. I don’t know who was responsible for this.
CC: It’s in bad shape. What are your hopes for the memorial?
JC: They should bring it back. They should retain the pool. I know what they want – they want to make volleyball courts in there, I don’t think so.
CC: You don’t like that idea?
JC: No, I don’t think they should. Fix the thing up, it should have been fixed up fifty years ago.
CC: We also spoke with Jim Bickerton, the attorney for the Kaimana Beach Coalition. He had plenty to say about what the group thinks is wrong with this latest alternative of a modified swim basin over the proposal of tearing out the pool and recreating the memorial arch inland.
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Jim Bickerton: You know, what’s driven us isn’t any opposition to history. We’re sympathetic to those people who have nostalgia for the old days. We sometimes say that it would be nice if, you know, if you were that nostalgic, why don’t you tear down all the hotels at the other end of the beach? Why do you have to do something with the last bit of public oceanfront that the community is still able to use? That’s kind of been our stance, that it’s really about preserving the ocean experience for the majority of working people in Honolulu.
JB: If you think about this little stretch of coastline, it’s wedged on one side by two exclusive private clubs most people can’t belong to, the Outrigger Club and the Elks Club, and it’s wedged on the other side by a wall of hotels. And the tourists own that beach in front of those hotels. What is the area that this oceanfront serves? It’s the most densely populated two or three ahupuaʻa on the island. You’re looking at Mānoa, Pālolo, some even Nuʻuanu, people coming from the ridges in between those valleys, and then all of Mōʻiliʻili, and Kapahulu, and all around the university. It’s literally a hundred thousand people or more, minimum. And this is their beach. And why are you gonna do any solution that is going to allow other people from other than that group to use it for their commercial purposes, to block them out when the local people want to use the beach, why are you gonna do that? What is the rational for that?
JB: People lose sight of these issues when they talk about, well, we should honor the veterans, and so forth. That’s not what this is really about. It’s about who is going to benefit from and use the last piece of public shoreline in Waikiki. Really, that’s it.
CC: This new alternative with this swim basin – what are the other issues that you have with it?
JB: Well, there are a lot of issues with restoring that much of the Natatorium. One of things, again, focusing on this idea that whatever goes there should be public and free, what happens when you start having large structures and facilities is you get exactly what the Mayor said the other day. His words were, we’re looking for a public/private partnership. I think most of your listeners know by now that that’s a code for somebody’s going to make some money off this deal. And why? Because it’s expensive. It is expensive to build, it’s expensive to maintain, I’ll get into some of the costs of that. The reason that we favored a public beach and just preserving the archways and some of the other aspects of the memorial was we had a win-win. We would not have had to invite in any private corporations into that solution. You can look around this island and there is no public/private partnership at any Honolulu City and County beach park. It’s all public.
JB: And so we think that when you put something together that is this large, remember this is larger than a football field, it’s huge – it requires constant upkeep and maintenance, it requires a lot of money to build and maintain, and that corporation that is paying for that wants to make its money back. It needs to hold events there. We will see, I am sure, [a] stage in the middle of the pool. They’ll use the bleachers for hula shows. Everyone says, oh, that sounds lovely! But you won’t get to go to those hula shows, they’ll probably be priced way out of your league, it’s for the tourists down the street.
CC: So it’s access and commercialism that you’re concerned about?
JB: Those are the number one and number two priorities of our group. But we do have a third one, which is we also believe that it’s important to have a safe and healthy swimming experience, and that the existing swimming experience, which is a wonderful one at that beach – I taught my two older children to swim there, so many people have grown up learning to swim and play in the water there – that beach shouldn’t be harmed, and it shouldn’t be affected. That’s why the name of our group originally is the Save Kaimana Beach Coalition, because most of the ideas, including this one, are going to damage or destroy Kaimana Beach and significantly reduce the quality of the experience. And the reasons for that I can get into. They’re technical, but you’re gonna have not only the access issues but there is 90 years of silt trapped in that basin. And I’ve read this Environmental Impact Statement cover to cover and for this project with this thing that they’re proposing there is not one mitigation step to keep that silt from leaking out into the surrounding waters. And it’ll, you know, when silt has sat there that long it’s black muck. That’s what we understand is there right now.
JB: When they were gonna make a beach there was a – part of the beach plan is a mitigation of that black muck. But that isn’t in the pool plan, and they’re just gonna leave it in there. But the pool is being made open to the ocean at least at one or two ends, so what’s going to happen to that black muck when they build that? They don’t have an answer for that. We’re very concerned that it’s going to enter the water surrounding the area, including Kaimana beach.
CC: So basically degrade the quality of the beach as we know it, and there’s also the marine preserve on the other side?
JB: Correct. And also there’s some safety issues. So, here’s the problem with a – if you enclose the pool, you have to meet swimming pool rules and you have to have certain health quality – you have to have pumps and filters, that’s too expensive for them, they don’t want to spend the money on that. So they want to make it open. But that means that the current flows through it. And yet what they’re going to do is build a mesh wall. I can picture it now. I’m a tort lawyer. I mean, that’s what I do for my day job. And, you know, I can see the lawsuits that are gonna flow from people who got trapped when there’s a large swell running, or the tide is in full flood, we have one of the king tides. You’re gonna have currents running through that Natatorium of several knots. You’re gonna have weak swimmers who are getting pinned against that mesh. And you know, I haven’t seen anything in the Environmental Impact Statement that says this mesh system in the facility that is exposed to ocean currents has been tested anywhere, that it’s safe in any way. I also have to ask, why won’t the same thing happen to this Natatorium that happened to the first one?
JB: The first one had algae and other sea life encrusted all [over] the openings that allowed water to flow through. How do they know that algae and other sea creatures aren’t going to grow on this lovely lattice that they’re building on the sides of the pool to allow water to flow in and out, and that we won’t have the same problem that we had [with the] first pool? That basically it had to be shut down because the circulation stopped, because of the growth of marine organisms?
CC: So to recap, safety because when the waves come crashing against that wall that is there now, it bounces off.
JB: Right.
CC: But in a mesh system basically if you’re swimming there [you] might get pinned against this grid?
JB: It will set up occurrences every surfer and other people who use the ocean know, when the surf is up or the tide is running, currents get set up by all of that energy moving and it has to go somewhere. So it finds a path. And that path is going to be through the pool rather than around the pool when the pool is enclosed. It’ll go through the pool. People swimming in the pool will feel it tugging them towards one side or the other. But then they’ll eventually encounter that mesh wall and they’ll be pinned against it. Now, you or I might be able to hop out at that point, but a little kid? Maybe not. Maybe a tourist who’s visiting, who doesn’t know the ocean or how to swim that well might not be. And then the City’s looking at lawsuits. I don’t know if those are factored into the cost of this strange and untested design.
CC: Now I know the Friends of the Natatorium had said that they thought this was a good compromise, but you don’t see it as a compromise, you see it as a way to be able to commercialize?
JB: Yeah, and that – you know, when we’ve looked at who the people are who are actually in that group, they have a lot of well-meaning members, but the people that actually lead that group all work for design and engineering companies that have a stake in the project. And, you know, without selling their motives too much, we do have to question whether they really care about the commercialization problem, whether that’s really a factor for them. They really seem to only want to get restoration at any cost without looking at whether it’s going to alter the experience that people have in that area.
JB: A hundred years ago, or ninety years ago when the Natatorium was opened, it was a very different world. Public actually owned things and was willing to spend money on it. We now live in a world where even though we are ten times richer than we were ninety years ago, people have decided that we don’t believe in spending money on public things any more, we want private companies to pay for it. But those private companies need to make a profit. And so it’s a very different environment than it was back then, and you can’t go backwards. You can’t achieve a kind of situation that we had back then, even though everyone would love to go back to the old days, you really can’t. We have to live in the modern world. The modern world has people coming from all over the globe bringing who knows what with them in terms of pathogens, you want a pool that’s well circulating. But if it’s gonna be well circulating, you need to have it safe. Years ago [a] little boy drowned in that pool on a school expedition and no one knew about it ’til they got back to school, no one even knew he was at the bottom of the pool. And the reason was the water was so turbid you couldn’t see the bottom. It’s one of the reasons we have the swimming pool rules today. And we don’t see how that problem has been cured.
JB: We also notice that the decks are about four feet off the water and the water at low tide is only about four feet deep. I sure wouldn’t want my kids diving off a four foot platform into four feet of water, that’s a whole [other] set of liability that the City’s exposing itself to. It doesn’t seem like the Environmental Impact Statement has considered any of these issues.
CC: OK. And the public has until the end of next month to weigh in?
JB: Yes. I hope people will read the Environmental Impact Statement and comment on these issues, because I think that the city really has been trying to listen. The problem has been that the restoration group, they had a large amount of funding from one of their members who left her fortune to the group in a will. They’ve been able to make a very nice movie about it, they hold lots of meetings and rallies. Their numbers are not great. Every time there’s a poll in the paper our solution always comes out on top. When we’ve held our actual rallies there’s been hundreds and hundreds of people who’ve come to them. But, you know, they have the microphone right now. It’s Veterans Day, you know, everyone’s thinking about the veterans. And so, you know, they have the stage. But I think that as people really study this and as the City takes the time to look at it, they’ll realize that the solution they worked so hard to come up with – and were sticking to for years – which is the public beach, really is the best solution for the community. We’re all in favor of making sure that that beach is a veteran’s memorial beach and that the truly important aspects of the Natatorium are retained. But as far building a set of bleachers for the tourists? Who needs that?
CC: So the – stripping away everything, the glaring points are this platform, and safety.
JB: The lack of public access that will result from the public/private partnerships that are needed for this kind of large structure, and the health and safety issues and the impact on the surrounding neighborhood and the access of people to the ocean resource.
CC: The public will have until December 24th, Christmas Eve, to submit testimony. For links to the EIS, go to our Web page at hawaiipublicradio.org.
KBC: the Draft EIS can be read at http://808ne.ws/Natatoriumreview.
