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Maui folks of a certain age may remember a foul smell wafting over the road between Olowalu and Lahaina.
Sort of a blend between rotten eggs and the smoke of a branding iron pressed to a calf's hide, the acrid stench was the product of a persistent underground fire at Olowalu Dump that lasted for years at the end of the 1970s and into the '80s. This was when county dumps were scattered around the island, including in Waikapu, Makawao, Hana and Olowalu.
In those bygone days, a favorite pastime of many dump users was to have a look around to see if anything worth salvaging had been discarded. Dump workers would sometimes help load things into trucks or point out items of interest. Scrap wood, ceramic crocks, tin roofing, unused building materials, it was not uncommon for people to go home with more junk than they brought.
If memory serves, a tragic accident ended the scavenging not long before the dumps were closed and Maui County's new Central Maui Sanitary Landfill was opened on Pulehu Road in 1987. The modern landfill was a huge, stories-high, rectangular hole in the blue rock with a thick concrete floor to keep contaminants from leaching into the ground. It was meant to last years, but with the construction of the Grand Wailea Hotel, Four Seasons Resort and Ritz-Carlton Kapalua in full swing, that phase of the dump filled in the blink of an eye. It stands as one of the tall mounds crowding the landfill's acreage.
Now a new Olowalu dump has been opened, a "temporary" site scheduled to hold an estimated 40,000 truckloads of toxic ash, soil and debris from burned-out Lahaina. In place of a concrete floor, the landfill nestled into a cinder cone several hundred yards uphill from the ocean is to be contained by a double layer of impermeable liner.
The site that opened this week has caused much consternation for some residents and elected officials who fear poisons will leach into the watershed and foul the nearby ocean. Considering what has happened at other failed government-run projects, including the leaking Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility on Oahu, it is hard to fault their concerns.
Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen, a majority of the Maui County Council, the Hawaii Board of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have all signed off on the project. They promise to do everything in their power to insure the safety of the Olowalu environment. We hope they can keep that promise.
For Lahaina, this is one of the first of many important compromises to be made in the months and years to come. There will be a constant juggling between what is ideal and what is feasible. One-hundred-percent consensus may be impossible, but that doesn't mean people should stop holding decision-makers accountable.