Emergency road
will link two
Puna areas
Repair of the direct route may help
By Rod Thompson
those divided by more than 20 miles
Star-BulletinHAWAIIAN ACRES, Hawaii -- When a brush fire broke out in rural Ainaloa south of Hilo this spring, volunteer Fire Chief "Weldin' " Sheldon Lehman from neighboring Hawaiian Acres rushed to help by the most direct route available, driving his 500-gallon tanker through a rocky papaya field.
The two subdivisions are a third of a mile apart, but driving from one to the other over existing roads would have required a circular 20-mile trip.
That separation is about to end with the creation of the Puna Emergency Road, linking the two subdivisions and providing a second, nonhighway link between the upper and lower parts of the Oahu-sized Puna district.
Hawaii County expects to put the road out to bid about the end of this month, said Norman Olesen, the county official in charge.
Lehman began pushing for the road in 1983, the year a forest fire burned several thousand acres and five homes in largely undeveloped Hawaiian Acres and neighboring Fern Acres.
County firefighting equipment had a hard time getting to the blaze, eight miles from the Volcano Highway over roads that varied from bad to miserable.
Lehman saved his own house by bulldozing a firebreak around it.
Three days into the fire, a police officer confronted Lehman and 30 friends helping him, drew his gun, and ordered them to evacuate.
"He was disciplined for that," Lehman said.
Unattended, Lehman's neighbor's house burned that night.
After the fire, Lehman set up the volunteer fire department and lobbied for a better road.
Ten years later, county Fire Chief Nelson Tsuji proposed a revised version, one linking Ainaloa and Hawaiian Acres.
A lot of people in both places immediately hated the idea.
Hawaiian Acres was part of the area known as the "Wild West" because of marijuana growers.
A rough road had existed between Ainaloa and Hawaiian Acres, but Ainaloa people put up a gate (someone knocked it down), placed huge boulders in the road (someone moved them), and dug a trench (four-wheel-drive vehicles drove around it), Lehman said.
Ainaloa's reputation wasn't much better. Former Hawaiian Acres community President David Taylor said Ainaloa people didn't want "rip-offs" from the Acres. Hawaiian Acres people said they didn't want "thieves" from Ainaloa.
"It was almost tribal," he said.
Taylor pushed for the road anyway, earning threats against his home and family. Just when the county was poised to start in 1996, "I was voted out, vehemently."
Current Hawaiian Acres president Roberta Brashear has mixed feelings. "I wasn't in favor of it because it wasn't going to be a safe one," she said.
Now she says she's for it, but still not happy about it.
The problem is that its purpose, an emergency link between two areas, means it still won't be much to brag about.
Most of its course will involve taking the existing, badly paved, single-lane "8 Road" and turning it into a better-paved but still hillocky country road only 16 feet wide with a 25 mph speed limit.
That's better than Hawaiian Acres can do by itself, Brashear says, because payment of road fees to the community association is voluntary, and many people stopped paying during the controversy.
But support for the road has grown, boosted, for example, by parents wanting a more direct route to take their children to the new swimming pool in Pahoa.
The Wild West image also faded as pot growers were replaced by escapees from the rat race in Honolulu, says Brashear, herself one of them. "There's a lot of influx of people with jobs," she said.
From the county's perspective, the problem has been finding a legal way to take over the private road, said the county's Olesen.
The county first tried to take the road under a law dealing with landowners surrendering it, but the state Land Court blocked that.
The county might condemn the road, but the county would have to sue and pay 4,000 property owners in the subdivision, said county lawyer Fred Giannini.
The county finally decided to forget about ownership and to go straight to fixing it, saying the county owns a fire station in the subdivision and has the right to provide proper access to its own facility, Olesen said.
Congresswoman Patsy Mink obtained $500,000 in federal funds, and the county has another $900,000 for the project.
After all the delays, Brashear is still skeptical.
"Show me a bulldozer," she said.
