Commercial water haulers and greenhouses in the Ocean View area are bracing for financial losses after the Hawaii County Department of Water Supply on Monday issued an Essential Needs Only notice for the subdivision’s public water spigots due to a well failure.

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Commercial water haulers and greenhouses in the Ocean View area are bracing for financial losses after the Hawaii County Department of Water Supply on Monday issued an Essential Needs Only notice for the subdivision’s public water spigots due to a well failure.

The department announced in a press release that until further notice, spigot users “are asked to limit their consumption to essential needs only, such as drinking, cooking (and) personal hygiene.” This cooperation, DWS said, will “extend current water availability in the reservoir.”

According to the release, DWS will be hauling water from Naalehu to the Ocean View reservoir tank while the well is undergoing repairs.

Known locally as a “filling station,” the Ocean View water spigot facility located on Lehua Lane is open from 7 a.m.–7 p.m. and is a lifeline for the subdivision’s estimated 4,500 to 6,000 residents, the vast majority of whom rely on rain catchment as their sole water source. This is threatened by perennial droughts caused by wind patterns and the rain shadow of Mauna Loa.

As a result, many residents rely on commercial water haulers to top up their catchment tanks during times of extended drought. These haulers typically fill their trucks at the two “standpipes” found at the filling station. But now that Ocean View’s well is out of commission for the foreseeable future, DWS has stated that “the standpipe facility for water haulers is closed until repairs can be completed.”

Rudy Kaupu is a commercial water hauler and owner of Wai Moku Deliveries, operating out of Naalehu and serving customers living across a wide swath of Ka‘u and South Kona. Kaupu told the Tribune-Herald that Ocean View’s well going down will significantly increase the time he must wait to fill his truck at the Naalehu filling station because he’ll be stuck behind the ranks of haulers who would normally fill up in Ocean View roughly 15 miles away.

“For me I gotta cut back my loads because now they all gonna pile up where I normally fill,” he said. “All of the Ocean View haulers are heading to Naalehu for their deliveries … we all gonna pile up now, and it will affect my schedule as well as theirs because now I gotta wait in line which makes the day long.”

When the Ocean View well failed a few years ago and haulers in the area converged at the Naalehu filling station, he said he would often spend between two to four hours a day just waiting for his turn at the standpipe. That’s because a 6,000 gallon water truck can take over 30 minutes to fill.

On Monday he said he had six water deliveries scheduled that day and hoped he’d be able to get to them all.

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“Normally we’ll schedule from five to eight loads a day — it depends — but now I gotta cut it back,” he said. “I gotta do at least four loads and hopefully I get all four in with all the extra haulers being down there.”

Plant nurseries in Ocean View like K’s Greenhouse located off of Catamaran Lane rely on commercial water haulers like Kaupu to keep their plants alive, supplemented by hauling smaller loads from the spigot using a tank in the bed of a pickup truck — trips now banned by the Essential Needs Only notice.

Karen Field runs the nursery with her partner Sepeti Latu, and recalled that in extremely dry years she’s had to spend a small fortune in hauling fees to ensure her plants survive.

“One year I paid over $3,000 to keep my business going,” Field said.

The last time the nursery needed a water delivery, she said it cost $265 for 4,000 gallons. Now with the increased driving distance and waiting time incurred by filling up in Naalehu, she’s confident that haulers will be charging more than $300 per load.

When the expense gets to be too much, she said she will stop watering the plants altogether and just focus on critical household needs.

“What we do is we just stop watering anything outside and just concentrate on the things that we need to have,” she said. “Your household use comes first — everything else goes to the wayside.”

Latu claimed that the cost incurred by the county paying water haulers to make countless trips from Naalehu to Ocean View and back to keep the reservoir from running dry will end up dwarfing the price of a backup pump.

“What gets me is that the county knows that this will happen, right?” he said. “Why don’t they have a plan B, when this pump broke, why don’t we have one in hand so we can fix the darn thing right away? There has never been a time when it was broke and they fix it right away.”

“If you think of it,” he added, “with all that money that the county has to pay just for (them) to haul water up from Naalehu all day long, that costs more than just having a pump ready on the side when this one breaks.”

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Email Stefan Verbano at [email protected].