Honolulu must learn from everglades tragedy
Did policymakers in Florida learn a lesson from that experience? Hell no. Instead, they called in the Army Corps of Engineers to build the massive Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee, permanently cutting off the Everglades from its source.
The corps built America’s most ambitious flood-control system, with more than 2,000 miles of levees and canals. The project gave water managers the power to move almost every drop of rain that fell south of Orlando, allowing them to whisk floodwaters into the lake, the Everglades, or its estuaries for the convenience of farms and the further development of towns and resorts, but at the expense of the natural ecology of the area.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because we did, essentially, the same thing on Oʻahu. In 1928, the same year that a hurricane sent storm surges bursting through a flimsy muck dike on Lake Okeechobee, killing 2,500 pioneers in the Everglades, engineers in Honolulu built the Ala Wai canal, sacrificing the marshes of Waikīkī for the profits of a new tourism engine that has come to dominate practically every aspect of life in Hawaiʻi.
History does repeat itself. Our elected officials in Hawaiʻi seem determined to double down on further interference, believing—as they did in southern Florida—that we can simply build our way out of a problem that was only created by building in the first place.
Mayor Kirk Caldwell and Governor David Ige are in talks with none other than the Army Corps to build a concrete wall around the Ala Wai Canal, an embankment around the Ala Wai golf course, and seven large detention basins near residential areas in Makiki, Mānoa and Pālolo valleys, upstream of tens of thousands of homes, schools and businesses.
The mighty Hoover Dike is now at risk of a catastrophic failure. Wanting to avoid another disaster like the 1928 dike burst, water managers often blast billions of gallons out of Lake Okeechobee when its waters get too high, ravaging the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries to its east and west, and wasting fresh water they need in times of drought.
That’s how southern Florida got into its current predicament. Rain that used to fall on wetlands, recharge aquifers, and dribble across the landscape all year long now falls on yards, roads and parking lots, gushes into canals, and is quickly flushed out to sea. The Everglades are now dry enough to burn out of control anytime a spark is introduced.
I want to protect the community from devastating floods. But history has shown us that the path to get there cannot be a paved one.
