DOH ISSUES GUIDANCE FOR EXISTING CESSPOOL USE IN RESIDENTIAL KULA

News release from Hawaii DoH, November 12, 2024  

HONOLULU — The Hawaiʻi Department of Health (DOH) is issuing Guidance for Existing Cesspool Use in Residential Kula, Maui. It was developed in an effort to support Kula residents affected by the wildfires, working to rebuild and reoccupy their homes.

This guidance follows a similar framework as the guidance for the Wahikuli Houselots Subdivision in Lahaina, but with significant differences due to the fact that neither the County of Maui nor private wastewater collection systems have plans for building wastewater treatment works for the Kula area.

The significant differences are:

• Cesspools must have a lining that is certified to be structurally sound by a Hawaiʻi licensed civil engineer.
• The rebuilt dwelling’s quantity of bedrooms may not exceed the quantity of bedrooms of the previous dwelling on the County of Maui record.
• The rebuilt dwelling may not have more than five bedrooms, even if the previous dwelling had more than five bedrooms, in accordance with Hawai‘i Administrative Rules, Chapter 11-62.

The County of Maui has been coordinating with the DOH in the development and implementation of this guidance, which allows wildfire-impacted homeowners to rebuild and reoccupy homes while ensuring the integrity of existing cesspools and without creating new cesspools.

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Rebuild of homes destroyed in Kula fire runs into costly Cesspool upgrades

Maui Now, Sept 29, 2024 (excerpt) 

… “We had a golden window,” said Ross, who lost his home on Kualono Place. “We could build unencumbered in a sense and not have to wait in line … because we knew Lahaina was a priority.”

But Ross and others in Kula feel that golden window is closing amid the long wait to get approvals and pay for the costly wastewater upgrades needed to rebuild their homes.

Now, with Lahaina’s residential fire debris cleanup complete and just a handful of homes under construction in Kula, residents worry progress in Upcountry is stalling. 

“Kula was the first one to be cleared by the Army Corps (of Engineers),” Kyle Ellison, head of the nonprofit Mālama Kula, said during a meeting in Pukalani on Tuesday. “Now Kula is falling behind in the rebuild process, largely due to the bottleneck in the wastewater. So there’s an urgency to this that I just want to make sure comes out of this meeting tonight.” 

The state Department of Health is considering changes that would allow Upcountry properties to use the cesspools they had before the fire, an exemption extended earlier this year to Lahaina. Residents hope this will help them rebuild more quickly.

But Kula, as is the rest of the state, is running up against a law passed by the state Legislature in 2017 that mandates all cesspools be eliminated in Hawai’i by 2050….

read … Rebuild of homes destroyed in Kula fire runs into costly wastewater upgrades