Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.

Forum will take
a look at lava
tube pollution

The conference, sponsored
by the Speleological Society,
focuses on Kaumana Cave

---

By Rod Thompson
Big Island correspondent

HILO --Surrounded by ferns, ohias, and rose apple trees, the entrance to Kaumana Cave lava tube in Hilo is an unusual and pretty attraction.

Fortunately, most people don't go far into the uphill part of the cave. If they did, they would find piles of rubbish and raw sewage.

The National Speleological Society will hold a free Conference on Lava Tubes and Groundwater Contamination tomorrow at Hilo's Lyman House Museum, focusing on Kaumana Cave.

"I'm really trying to get people thinking," said conference co-chairman William Halliday.

A retired physician, Halliday lives part-time in Hawaii, part-time in Tennessee, and part-time traveling the world, visiting caves.

Although Hawaii's lava tube caves have a different origin from the limestone caves of Appalachia, they function in a similar way, he said.

Unlike places where water seeps through soil, the caves provide places for underground rivers to flow.

During heavy rains, water floods various parts of Kaumana Cave and overflows onto Edita Street, biologist Fred Stone wrote in a 1992 study of the cave.

People have dumped trash into the cave through a hole in its ceiling "for a long period," Stone wrote.

Halliday said the trash pile is about 10 feet high and 30 feet long. The pile holds dolls, tires, pesticide cans, and other waste, including medicine bottles dating to the 1970s and earlier, he said.

Volunteer cavers would help clean up the trash, but they need technical assistance from experts on potentially hazardous waste, he said.

The cave also has some sewage dripping into it, although not as badly as another lava tube up the Hamakua Coast that Halliday calls Honokaa Sewer Cave.

County wastewater chief Peter Boucher, who will speak at the conference, says such sewage eventually reaches the ocean, where it can contribute to children getting infections at beaches.

Another speaker, hydrologist Stephen Bowles, is more skeptical, saying "It's not a wide-ranging problem today." But he, too, says, "Find it and correct it."

Speaker Gregory Middleton, an Australian national parks official, says he has seen how bad conditions can be in lava caves on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

The island is the size of Kauai, but has a population of a million, he said. People there wash their clothes and swim in sewage-polluted underground streams, he said.

"There definitely are health hazards," Middleton said.

The half-day conference starts at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. It is open to the public.

A tour of Kaumana Cave for properly equipped participants (lights, helmets, gloves and boots) will follow lunch.