CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
David Nguyen, left, Alex Kim, Jason Ramano and David Kim, all students from Washington Middle School, tested water yesterday taken from nearby Kanealole Stream in Tantalus.
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Students get clean-water lesson
Eighth-graders test water quality at Makiki and Ala Wai streams
About 60 students from Washington Middle School got to analyze the muck and debris in Makiki Stream and the Ala Wai Canal up close on World Water Monitoring Day yesterday.
"The message we are trying to give them is to be good stewards of their environment," said Michael Wong, a hydraulic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
This is the third year that city and state agencies, in cooperation with the Corps, have taught the eighth-graders how to take water samples and analyze the results. The water-monitoring kits were used to determine the amount of pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature, turgidity, nitrate, phosphate and conductivity.
Eighth-graders from Debbie Jensen and Philip Anderson's classes also visited the Hawaii Nature Center before visiting the two streams. Today the students conclude their lesson by cleaning up the Makiki Stream, next to their school on Punahou and King streets.
Iwalani Sato, a public education coordinator with the city Department of Environmental Services, said she hopes taking the students to see the pollution in Makiki Stream will make them realize that the source of most of the debris is people not properly discarding their trash. The idea is to encourage them to stop this from happening, she added.
Eighth-grader Kia Agustin said their water quality analysis showed that "the Ala Wai is much dirtier" than Makiki Stream, in which previous cleanups have revealed "cups, trash bags, shopping carts. We even found a water heater!"
Paper plates and plastic bags mingled with ducklings and schools of fish at the stagnant Kapahulu end of the Ala Wai, where the state has staked islands of akulikuli vegetation to improve the quality of water.
Wong said the Ala Wai's level of pollution, according to water samples, is "not out of the ordinary" although the nitrate level (which shows the amount of debris) is "a little higher than found in the upper watershed."
Student Jerrica Bugarin, who earns A's in science, said she and her classmates like filling test tubes with stream water, putting tablets in the tubes and watching the water change color.
"We get to test stuff like chemicals -- that's cool -- instead of just doing paperwork. We get to mix stuff and see what happens," Bugarin said.
She was surprised to learn that the Ala Wai ranged over such a wide area, and that the canal and its pollution feed right into the ocean, where "it travels all over the world."
Sato said three streams in Makiki, Manoa and Palolo feed into the Ala Wai, combining at a point near Iolani School below the H-1 freeway.
World Water Monitoring Day was initiated in 2002 by America's Clean Water Foundation to help people understand how the actions of individuals in a watershed can affect others.