> There is a perspective [in Hawaiʻi] that we are reliant on the military for our jobs, economy, and security, so the state has not questioned the assertions of the military in a lot of ways, including with regards to Red Hill. . . . I’m hoping that recent events have demonstrated to our legislators that the navy can’t be trusted with our water, this foundation of our lives. They have promised us time and again that they are somehow able to think of everything to protect us and this irreplaceable water source, yet they have failed time and again to do just that.
Military protection at the expense of essential services is some of the more sobering irony I've seen. What's the point of having the biggest, baddest military in the world if they make your community uninhabitable in the process?
Pearl Harbor is an enormous base. Incidents like this tell basically nothing about the base rate of military vs business vs residential environmental accidents.
And it's not about "military protection" as much as "the US military pumps ridiculous amounts of money into the local area".
I don't think it's that silly since there's a very real risk to water supply contamination. As we saw in Flint, MI, apathy absolutely allows mass degradation of important infrastructure to the point of failure. But we accept it because it's not happening in our community.
Most important questions have multi-causal answers, without additional information I would guess that both "tourism is the economic engine" and "military bases are the economic engine" are likely to be incorrect.
Hawaiian GDP seems to have dropped ~8% in 2020 [1] where tourism spending plummeted let's say 50% [2]. I would expect that Hawaiian military payroll has stayed roughly fixed during the pandemic.
This seems to put an upper bound on tourism at ~20% GDP. Quite high! You would not want to lose it, but not the sole engine of economic success.
I like the math, just to point out that you are perhaps forgetting transfer payments, government aid etc since the pandemic so tourism may be higher than 20%
> Since statehood in 1959, tourism has been the largest industry, contributing 24.3% of the gross state product (GSP) in 1997, despite efforts to diversify... In 2009, the United States military spent US$12.2 billion in Hawaii, accounting for 18% of spending in the state for that year. 75,000 United States Department of Defense personnel live in Hawaii.
If anyone has a breakdown of this that fits into these (or other) nice categories please share. Based on my searches:
(1) Tourism (this includes real estate rentals, entertainment, travel)
(2) Government (defense)
(3) Ocean surface transportation
Take out the rich non-natives and federal employees/contractors and Hawaii is a poor state. The per capita income does not account for the very high cost of living there.
Tourist dollars tend towards maintaining that industry and the state just doesn’t have the funds to support large infrastructure projects without heavy federal funding (water, power, ports, roads, airports, IT backbone). Many of islands run on shoestring budgets.
When I visited, I learned that one of the islands is powered by bunker fuel (what ships use, and perhaps the dirtiest widely-used hydrocarbon-based fuels).
Meanwhile, the FSO Safer is sitting off the coast of Yemen, ready to kill everything in the Red Sea, contaminate hundreds of miles of ocean (with oil) and land (with poisonous fumes), and stop much of the world's shipping.
It is already slowly leaking, but could explode any minute.
People forget that these theoretical disasters can become reality.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. If it spilled, it would disrupt the Suez Canal and jeopardize the livelihoods of 1.7 million people who depend on fish.
Maybe they should've considered that before they decided to depend on fish and not American businesses, thereby making themselves expendable! There really is no respect for personal responsibility in the world these days.
And this is where people will learn that even if the US government contaminated the water supply of the entire US or accidentally detonated a nuclear bomb of Manhattan killing millions, the response will be... we had a systematic failure, sorry for your loss, we'll try to do better next time.
Ugh.... this is tragic. The legacy of the US's impact on Hawai'ians is already bad, and there's still resentment towards the way non-native people treat the island and its people. Of all the things to destroy, the beaches and the water.... not only are they basically sacred, they're also the lifeblood of tourism (which the military couldn't care less about, but it's pretty damn significant to the local economy)
Every US Navy base is a toxic waste catastrophe, even the ones that have long been closed.
Systemic problems in waste management on military base land stem from defense budgets that go to fun, sexy projects and toxic waste cleanup budgets that are for civilian sites only.
Expect all 20th century Navy bases to pollute indefinitely. Hawai'i particularly sad because everyone knows what a loss it is. The death of places like the San Francisco Bay ecosystems are less visible.
Almost every military base and aerospace contractor. A nearby high school is going to be a superfund site soon because after WW2, some jackass decided to just dump toxic chemicals, and the underground plume is migrating faster than the remediation efforts.
If you look at a map of pollution sites, it’s pretty easy to see where defense related stuff was active 1940-1980. Look around Stanford, the old Grumman facilities on Long Island and Burlington, MA.
Almost every military base and aerospace contractor, not just navy. A nearby high school is going to be a superfund site soon because after WW2, some jackass decided to just dump toxic chemicals, and the underground plume is migrating faster than the remediation efforts.
If you look at a map of pollution sites, it’s pretty easy to see where defense related stuff was active 1940-1980. Look around Stanford, the old Grumman facilities on Long Island and Burlington, MA.
> resentment towards the way non-native people treat the island and its people
you forgot, giant, muscular and overweight guys who rule by being the biggest and baddest on the Island. Its a thing, but they lost. Not to the USA, but to a series of really exploitive, unimaginably exploitive settlers, who then were thrown back to their own lands by force by other people that had industrial arms, uniforms, ships larger than your village, compass and other things. The result being a democratic government, but also the Bishop Museum scandal and you know, Larry Ellison (edit almost) owning an Island. The novel 'Hawaii' by James Michner is a palatable retelling of some of that. (spoiler: death and cruelty in the most beautiful place imaginable)
the real story is quite disturbing all around.. I agree with the anti-pollution part, however.. toxics are also no joke.
please note that giant, muscular and fat, does not include "stupid" .. many Pacific Islanders are notably accomplished in the modern times. btw- thought and prayer for the Tongan people right now
Not quite, the only thing I agree with you on is that there were externalities outside of Hawaii that became a catalyst for the coup, which is rarely mentioned
US and China were in a trade war in the 1890s, same story different century, this placed tariffs on agriculture imported to both unions, the only clever part is that the elite in Hawai’i realized that the tariffs magically disappear if a part of one of those unions. This was accurate. But it was such a clusterf*ck that it is indefensible. The US president had no idea it happened and was against it but ran out of time to do anything before his term was up, the next guy was like “lol awesome” and the rest is mostly history (aside from the part that Congress didn't want it because it meant Asian political representation in a US state, purely race based discrimination)
While I agree with the gist of your message, it must be noted that the State of Hawaii did not sell an island to Larry Ellison. Rather, most of Lanai, the island you are mentioning, was previously owned by a pineapple company. And Larry Ellison bought that land.
I highly recommend spending some time in Lanai if you find yourself on Maui. It’s a short boat ride, there’s a couple good beaches, some interesting geography, and about 1/1000 the volume of tourists you run into on Maui.
Its not tourists dumping fridges and cars on the side of the road and along the highway. Its not tourists polluting the beaches or driving over turtles with their fishing boats. There is a real misconception around the issues in hawaii and where the sources and sinks of environmental damage are found.
It is tourists creating the local economic conditions (tourism industry lobby) that preclude running any sort of real industry which is why those fridges are on the side of the road and not crushed and in a dumpster at the local scrap metal recycler.
The fisherman running over turtles (and all the other "fuck everyone but me) behavior is just how things work anywhere tourism is a major industry. When a large chunk of the local economy is dependent on single time transactions with outsiders it creates an massive trickle down incentive to behave that way. You see this same shit in base towns, college towns or any other dump where most of the monetary input is lifted from the pockets of short term transient residents that there is no incentive to do honest business with.
"Hawaii" is not just an English translation of "Hawaiʻi". The Gvoernment officially refers to the state of Hawaii as "Hawaii", and the largest island in the archipelago as "Hawaiʻi", as you can see through this National Parks document detailing the naming conventions:
> The name of the state,
Hawaii, is not written with an ‘okina between the two "i", because our Statehood Act in 1959
used the spelling "Hawaii." An Act of Congress is required to "correct" the name of the state to
Hawai‘i. Thus, the name of the state is Hawaii, while the name of the island of the same name is
Hawai‘i.
The document I've linked is written by an English speaking government, to convey to other English speakers on how to properly write the name of something within it's territorial borders. That same writing convention is also used by the local government, the citizens who live in that location, and indigenous population. This is not akin to multiple names for various locations in different languages (e.g. Vienna and Wien). The name of the island in English IS "Hawai'i" as defined by both the government who controls that island, and the culture on that island. Ergo, when writing the term in English, we should use "Hawai'i".
Misspelling "Hawai'i" as "Hawaii" is an understandably common error akin to how sometimes people use "Holland" and "The Netherlands" interchangeably (despite one being simply a region in the other). But make no mistake, the name in English for the country is The Netherlands, and the name in English for the region is Holland. Similarly, the name in English for the state is Hawaii, and the name in English for the island is Hawai'i. I find it strange that you are so insistent on this.
In addition to the sibling comment explaining the difference, consider that Vienna is an old city with many equivalent names in many languages. These names developed naturally over an extended period of time.
Hawaii does not have an equivalent history and so has no equivalent name in English. If the (English-speaking) people who live in such a place want to spell it in a specific way, what kind of an arrogant ass are you to tell them otherwise?
Are you going to also bristle at and take umbrage with the spelling "Reykjavík" instead of "Reykjavik"?
Actually, we're not speaking anything here... We're WRITING the name. If you want to be pedantic about it, you could at least get that right.
English spelling of transliterated names borrowed from other languages is pretty arbitrary. There isn't really a "correct" version of English spelling for any word, let alone words that did not originate in English, and which contain phonetic features that do not natively exist in English, and for which written English has limited conventional support.
Just ask anybody with surname imported from China or Korea to the US... There are often multiple valid spellings of the same name,supportinging on the vagaries of time period, accent, and immigration authorities. There is no single unified "correct" definition of any of these words, any more than there is a correct definition of the best shade of blue.
You may be confusing what YOU were taught for some kind of world standard... If so, I should point out that you sound like a jingoist. Are you deliberately trying to provoke people, or are you simply ignorant?
famous english language novel "Hawaii" (just checked it) is a novel by James Michener published in 1959, the year that Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state. It has been translated into 32 languages. The editors probably do know about the 'okina variation, too.
How long do you think that would last given the prime strategic location? Do you think any other countries would like a large base 1/2 way between Asia and the US mainland? It's sure a lot easier to take over an existing stable island than build your own, which China has been doing. https://www.newsweek.com/china-south-china-sea-islands-build...
Lol, there is zero chance that China can take Hawaii. This is meaningless fearmongering. The Chinese are going to have a hell of a tough time if they tried to invade Taiwan, 200km away (but they might succeed), what makes you think Hawaii, 10,000km away would be feasible?
Also, before taking Hawaii, they'd have to take Guam, which they don't even remotely plan to.
Absolute bollocks. The Chinese are never going to be economically or militarily dominant enough to pull it off. For the US to do it, they had to get in a position where they were >40% of the global economy. Even if every Chinese citizen was three times richer and that the average American didn't get any richer, they still wouldn't get to that kind of dominant position.
I'm sure once upon a time no one in their right mind considered Japan attacking Pearl Harbor a realistic possibility (as in "zero chance" to use your words), yet it happened. Doesn't have to be China at all - I just used it as an example of a country currently building artificial islands for military purposes and how taking an island with no military presence (US has left, remember) would be easier than building your own. It's a very strategic location. If the US left it, I don't think you can say with a high degree of confidence that someone else wouldn't be interested in taking it over. It's a relatively small place in the middle of a big ocean that is totally dependent on the outside for survival. Again, it doesn't have to be China. And I'm not advocating for the US keeping Hawaii. Just pointing out a simple realistic possibility that if the US left Hawaii, like the OP I was replying to suggested, that likely someone else will take it for themselves.
> Also, before taking Hawaii, they'd have to take Guam,
Why would the US Territory of Guam come into play if the US gave up Hawaii and it was no longer a part of the US to defend?
> I'm sure once upon a time no one in their right mind considered Japan attacking Pearl Harbor a realistic possibility (as in "zero chance" to use your words), yet it happened. Doesn't have to be China at all - I just used it as an example of a country currently building artificial islands for military purposes and how taking an island with no military presence (US has left, remember) would be easier than building your own. It's a very strategic location.
The attack on Pearl Harbor only worked because they managed to do it in secret. It would have been suicidal and a disaster otherwise. The US overestimated it's intelligence capabilities, but they were right to think it was an improbable attack. Nowadays this wouldn't work.
China's islands are very close to it's territory, and were preceded by 50 years of claims in that area.
> Again, it doesn't have to be China
Who else?
> Why would the US Territory of Guam come into play if the US gave up Hawaii and it was no longer a part of the US to defend?
For multiple reasons. Firstly, it's going to be impossible for the Chinese to actually hold Hawaii if Guam and it's related island chain is under US control and operational militarily. Fully impossible.
Second, if the Chinese indeed managed to fully take Hawaii, Guam becomes completely indefensible. So the US is essentially obliged not to let Hawaii come into Chinese hands or it's entire military position crumbles.
Thirdly, an invasion would be obvious and Guam is in a really good position to deny it.
Who else? The Mexican/LATAM drug cartels together with the cryptocoinian seasteaders, finally founding their freehaven cybercharter city, and be THE magnet for cruises from all around the world?
> Lol, there is zero chance that China can take Hawaii.
While it's part of the US? Yes. If it were independent? Things get a lot iffier. Enough "investment" money can corrupt small governments a lot more readily than a small government in a big one, and a full takeover may be unnecessary for quite some time.
This is, of course, orthogonal to the problem of whether it ought have such independence in an abstract, principled sense of things.
The good news would be that they would no longer be subject to the Jones Act and could freely trade with the US mainland using normal boats like everyone else does.
It could be because I didn't make that claim of keeping it because someone else might take it. I only pointed out that someone will likely want it absent a US presence due to its strategic location.
That's going to get expensive. Also not that distillation is useless for volatile organics, and can actually increase the concentration of lighter chemicals like benzene.
The filters that accompany a reverse osmosis water filter are fairly cheap, but I didn’t know that distillation machines could do that. I’m curious if boiling would break down the volatile organics.
Negative, 100 degrees C is far to low to degrade anything we're talking about here. Benzene, for example, is stable far beyond its autoignition temperature of 500 degrees C.
I use a Brondell water filter that solves this problem. It uses less pressure and wastes less water. They have a white paper that goes into more detail about how they accomplished it if you want to Google it.
Otherwise I agree with you. RO technology has mostly stagnated.
> This well, the Red Hill shaft, is one of three that provides water to residents on the Joint Base Pearl Harbor and Hickam (JBPHH) on the island of Oʻahu. For weeks, families living on the base registered complaints of a gasoline smell and taste in their water and illnesses ranging from vomiting to headaches, stomach pain, burning skin, and diarrhea. Initially, the navy dismissed residents’ concerns, but later admitted the water was unsafe for consumption and relocated more than 3,000 families to hotels. Because the navy shares an aquifer with the Board of Water Supply, officials worry that contamination in navy water wells could affect the city of Honolulu’s drinking water as well.
So: the people currently affected all live on the navy base. But the concern (not yet proven) is that this spill may affect the city water supply. Certainly concerning... do we know how to clean an aquifer if it becomes contaminated like this?
I'll add the caveat that the Navy's water system apparently reaches many houses and businesses that you wouldn't call "on the navy base." Watching that unfold was painful, like when a network goes down and the operators clearly don't know their own network. This includes housing neighborhoods for other military service members (i.e. Army, Coast Guard) who work elsewhere, run by a different property manager, and neighborhoods that were transferred back to the civilian community 10-20 years ago.
As mentioned in my other comment, what's most scary is that there's still no solid theory of what happened and when. We aren't sure of the chemicals, the amounts, the timeline, or the mechanism by which the chemicals got into the water. The story keeps changing, and never really adds up. So it does seem quite possible that the whole aquifer is at risk. The city plans to avoid drawing from this portion of the aquifer for several years now.
The leak rate of fueling stations and tanks is rather alarming. Oregon DEQ reports a 3% yearly rate which includes tanks, dispensers, and piping.[1]
It seems any petroleum fueling infrastructure needs to be moved far far away from ground or surface water infrastructure.
I started a site at postpump.org to encourage land use updates to do this-- many municipalities have done it already.
It is a tragedy this keeps happening and the I am sure the federal government likes to play by different rules. Hopefully one day we can stop storing tens of thousands of gallons of petroleum right next to fresh water sources.
I think it's well past time to make reverse-osmosis filters standard equipment for every residential kitchen sink. Water pollution is bad and we should still try to prevent it, but, given the actual rates of water pollution observed, the cost-benefit is completely overwhelming.
Which also takes out minerals and fluoride which you do want. It also is a big expense, and in many parts of the world, the municipal water is tasked with doing this kind of quality assurance for you.
This is of course cherry-picked. And having a million smaller deployments is harder than one big centralized one. But the anecdote here is that even in a well-off, large suburb like Sandy, the infrastructure that is meant to “protect” the residents actually poisoned them.
It’s hard to say, IMO, that municipal run water on its own it guaranteed to be safe.
Obviously accidents happen. But I’d bet 100x over on municipalities (at least in areas I’d want to live in) over ordinary people any day. In places like Cambridge MA, NYC and SF the water is checked multiple times a day for a wide variety of contaminants using industrial processes unavailable to consumers. Similarly, they have the techniques, resources, knowledge, and scale to do filtration not feasible for ordinary people. Just looking at the wide variety of masks out there for Covid and their usage, assuming ordinary people would be willing to pay for top RO equipment and maintain it seems like a leap too far (most would just get a Brita and call it a day). It’s also unreasonable — we pay taxes in order to solve societal problems at societal scale using specialized knowledge and standards that few can replicate.
If there are cases where municipal water supplies are contaminated and it’s unknown for a while, then we need to address that by either changing federal laws, changing funding sources, or otherwise fix such issues for all.
I agree and would never advocate termination of any common utility service, especially not water. I was careful to say that depending on those things alone and pretending like everything is honkey-dorey 100% is silly.
It was just one example. But stuff like this does happen. Just the other day another nearby city mailed all its residents that there was a problem discovered LAST SUMMER, but all is fine because it’s fixed… now.
I don’t know what the solution is. But it’s scary when it happens.
I really hope trust in municipal water systems isn't so low that we have to advise people to participate in the environmentally destructive industry that peddles bottled water...
Yet there are about 4000 places in the CONUS where the tap water is even more bad than in Flint. Which just happened to have a known speaker, who produced a documentary about it. Thinking about it, the study didn't even account for the crap that fracking can do. So it should be even more.
I don’t have a citation ready for this, but I recall reading that reverse osmosis creates something like 4 to 6 parts waste for every one part of filtered water. If that’s correct, it doesn’t seem sustainable or responsible on scale.
Just pointing out that whenever a profit seeking company has a disaster, or pollutes, etc., it's blamed on profit seeking. As if something magical happens without profits. Just what does one blame government disasters on?
Both private and public disasters can be attributed to either willful negligence, incompetence, or some combination of the two. In all cases there needs to be accountability via strong oversight and enforcement mechanisms.
I've been following this story for over a month now. What strikes me is that the state has been asking for the tanks to be drained for while now with the Navy pushing back saying it isn't necessary. I do think they have recently stated the tanks will be drained into a nearby stream.
wow - ten seconds in and there is a woman with cancer in bed crying.. If anyone has been close to that, it is really upsetting. I can't tell which is more extreme, a Navy that won't answer, or news drama with a closeup of a dying woman crying. Is this situation harder on the people subjected to this news, or the people whom it is trying to sway..
In my opinion, please know that what the dot-mil says in public may or may not have anything to do with their internal reasoning. The responsible parties internal discussion is shielded, and that leads to all sorts of results. There are hundreds of reasons, real or imagined, that might lead to "stalling" .. and don't forget, stalling is addictive, and accumulates!
My family is one of those 3,000+ immersed in this event. It was surreal seeing it on the front page of HN earlier today. We haven't touched the water in our house for about six weeks now, spending lots of time going back and forth between our house and hotels and laundromats and fast food places for daily needs, while trying to figure out what to do next. We're discarding most of our kitchen items and appliances that touched the water, and trying to move elsewhere.
At first, I figured that this was no big deal. We've dealt with water quality issues before in various places, using bottled water or boiling for a couple days, or just running the water until there was no visible sediment. I realized that this was more serious when other residents started reporting symptoms consistent with things that my family had experienced over the preceding weeks and months. The symptoms were mysterious and generally low-level, the kind that you would mention to your spouse but then write-off, rather than taking a sick day to see a doctor until they persist for a month. So we know that we were exposed to something nasty that we couldn't see, taste, or smell until it reached some peak around Thanksgiving.
What's most disconcerting is that we really have no idea how long we were exposed, to what chemicals, and in what amounts. I don't think we'll ever know, since rigorous sampling and testing and monitoring didn't start until after the Navy facilities folks started drawing water from a different well and flushing the pipes. Furthermore, there has been a pattern of Navy officials telling a story that everything is fine, and being evasive about the details, and then revising the story and releasing not-so-fine details later as a result of public outcry. Repeat several times. I don't even know what the working version of the official story is at this point. The Navy, Army (which also has many affected residents), and Hawaii Department of Health have issued starkly different guidance, forcing the Environmental Protection Agency to step in and mediate.
I actually considered submitting something on this to HN a few weeks ago, hoping to get opinions on the situation from some disinterested experts that hang out here. How bad might this be for us? Does any version of the story make sense?
The financial costs to the government will be staggering. Affected residents are getting paid for months of hotels, meals, and incidentals. We're submitting claims for damaged property items. The Navy has acquired dozens of huge filtration devices and flown them here overnight along with contractors to do remediation and consultants to inject expertise. All of this was over Christmas and the peak tourist season in Hawaii, plus COVID supply chain issues, at the highest possible prices.
Literally moments before reading this I was debating about using tap water instead of running to the store for bottled water to take my pills in my hotel on the island that this article is about. I’m here on vacation. I drank the tap water with hesitation and was pleased to find that it didn’t taste weird at all. After probably about a liter of it I am feeling fine. I am available to do more experiments if anyone wants.
113 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadMilitary protection at the expense of essential services is some of the more sobering irony I've seen. What's the point of having the biggest, baddest military in the world if they make your community uninhabitable in the process?
Pearl Harbor is an enormous base. Incidents like this tell basically nothing about the base rate of military vs business vs residential environmental accidents.
And it's not about "military protection" as much as "the US military pumps ridiculous amounts of money into the local area".
Hawaiian GDP seems to have dropped ~8% in 2020 [1] where tourism spending plummeted let's say 50% [2]. I would expect that Hawaiian military payroll has stayed roughly fixed during the pandemic.
This seems to put an upper bound on tourism at ~20% GDP. Quite high! You would not want to lose it, but not the sole engine of economic success.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187859/gdp-of-the-us-fed... [2]: https://www.hawaiitourismauthority.org/news/news-releases/20...
> Since statehood in 1959, tourism has been the largest industry, contributing 24.3% of the gross state product (GSP) in 1997, despite efforts to diversify... In 2009, the United States military spent US$12.2 billion in Hawaii, accounting for 18% of spending in the state for that year. 75,000 United States Department of Defense personnel live in Hawaii.
Tourist dollars tend towards maintaining that industry and the state just doesn’t have the funds to support large infrastructure projects without heavy federal funding (water, power, ports, roads, airports, IT backbone). Many of islands run on shoestring budgets.
It is already slowly leaking, but could explode any minute.
People forget that these theoretical disasters can become reality.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. If it spilled, it would disrupt the Suez Canal and jeopardize the livelihoods of 1.7 million people who depend on fish.
We (humans) really suck at not turning this planet shit.
Systemic problems in waste management on military base land stem from defense budgets that go to fun, sexy projects and toxic waste cleanup budgets that are for civilian sites only.
Expect all 20th century Navy bases to pollute indefinitely. Hawai'i particularly sad because everyone knows what a loss it is. The death of places like the San Francisco Bay ecosystems are less visible.
pointers?
If you look at a map of pollution sites, it’s pretty easy to see where defense related stuff was active 1940-1980. Look around Stanford, the old Grumman facilities on Long Island and Burlington, MA.
If you look at a map of pollution sites, it’s pretty easy to see where defense related stuff was active 1940-1980. Look around Stanford, the old Grumman facilities on Long Island and Burlington, MA.
you forgot, giant, muscular and overweight guys who rule by being the biggest and baddest on the Island. Its a thing, but they lost. Not to the USA, but to a series of really exploitive, unimaginably exploitive settlers, who then were thrown back to their own lands by force by other people that had industrial arms, uniforms, ships larger than your village, compass and other things. The result being a democratic government, but also the Bishop Museum scandal and you know, Larry Ellison (edit almost) owning an Island. The novel 'Hawaii' by James Michner is a palatable retelling of some of that. (spoiler: death and cruelty in the most beautiful place imaginable)
the real story is quite disturbing all around.. I agree with the anti-pollution part, however.. toxics are also no joke.
I really have doubts that the independent sovereign kingdom would have done it any differently
I think it dilutes the independence message as its the worst example of colonization
It could have gone the way of Puerto Rico- at least Hawaii is a State which makes them technically equal to the mainland.
US and China were in a trade war in the 1890s, same story different century, this placed tariffs on agriculture imported to both unions, the only clever part is that the elite in Hawai’i realized that the tariffs magically disappear if a part of one of those unions. This was accurate. But it was such a clusterf*ck that it is indefensible. The US president had no idea it happened and was against it but ran out of time to do anything before his term was up, the next guy was like “lol awesome” and the rest is mostly history (aside from the part that Congress didn't want it because it meant Asian political representation in a US state, purely race based discrimination)
I highly recommend spending some time in Lanai if you find yourself on Maui. It’s a short boat ride, there’s a couple good beaches, some interesting geography, and about 1/1000 the volume of tourists you run into on Maui.
Thanks, okay, you are correct. There was state approval involved. I'm not sure what regulation that entails, compared to simply providing notice.
The fisherman running over turtles (and all the other "fuck everyone but me) behavior is just how things work anywhere tourism is a major industry. When a large chunk of the local economy is dependent on single time transactions with outsiders it creates an massive trickle down incentive to behave that way. You see this same shit in base towns, college towns or any other dump where most of the monetary input is lifted from the pockets of short term transient residents that there is no incentive to do honest business with.
Source: lived it, but not on Hawaii
https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/DownloadFile/575333#:~:text=T....
> The name of the state, Hawaii, is not written with an ‘okina between the two "i", because our Statehood Act in 1959 used the spelling "Hawaii." An Act of Congress is required to "correct" the name of the state to Hawai‘i. Thus, the name of the state is Hawaii, while the name of the island of the same name is Hawai‘i.
Misspelling "Hawai'i" as "Hawaii" is an understandably common error akin to how sometimes people use "Holland" and "The Netherlands" interchangeably (despite one being simply a region in the other). But make no mistake, the name in English for the country is The Netherlands, and the name in English for the region is Holland. Similarly, the name in English for the state is Hawaii, and the name in English for the island is Hawai'i. I find it strange that you are so insistent on this.
Hawaii does not have an equivalent history and so has no equivalent name in English. If the (English-speaking) people who live in such a place want to spell it in a specific way, what kind of an arrogant ass are you to tell them otherwise?
Are you going to also bristle at and take umbrage with the spelling "Reykjavík" instead of "Reykjavik"?
English spelling of transliterated names borrowed from other languages is pretty arbitrary. There isn't really a "correct" version of English spelling for any word, let alone words that did not originate in English, and which contain phonetic features that do not natively exist in English, and for which written English has limited conventional support.
Just ask anybody with surname imported from China or Korea to the US... There are often multiple valid spellings of the same name,supportinging on the vagaries of time period, accent, and immigration authorities. There is no single unified "correct" definition of any of these words, any more than there is a correct definition of the best shade of blue.
You may be confusing what YOU were taught for some kind of world standard... If so, I should point out that you sound like a jingoist. Are you deliberately trying to provoke people, or are you simply ignorant?
Also, before taking Hawaii, they'd have to take Guam, which they don't even remotely plan to.
Absolute bollocks. The Chinese are never going to be economically or militarily dominant enough to pull it off. For the US to do it, they had to get in a position where they were >40% of the global economy. Even if every Chinese citizen was three times richer and that the average American didn't get any richer, they still wouldn't get to that kind of dominant position.
> Also, before taking Hawaii, they'd have to take Guam,
Why would the US Territory of Guam come into play if the US gave up Hawaii and it was no longer a part of the US to defend?
The attack on Pearl Harbor only worked because they managed to do it in secret. It would have been suicidal and a disaster otherwise. The US overestimated it's intelligence capabilities, but they were right to think it was an improbable attack. Nowadays this wouldn't work.
China's islands are very close to it's territory, and were preceded by 50 years of claims in that area.
> Again, it doesn't have to be China
Who else?
> Why would the US Territory of Guam come into play if the US gave up Hawaii and it was no longer a part of the US to defend?
For multiple reasons. Firstly, it's going to be impossible for the Chinese to actually hold Hawaii if Guam and it's related island chain is under US control and operational militarily. Fully impossible.
Second, if the Chinese indeed managed to fully take Hawaii, Guam becomes completely indefensible. So the US is essentially obliged not to let Hawaii come into Chinese hands or it's entire military position crumbles.
Thirdly, an invasion would be obvious and Guam is in a really good position to deny it.
While it's part of the US? Yes. If it were independent? Things get a lot iffier. Enough "investment" money can corrupt small governments a lot more readily than a small government in a big one, and a full takeover may be unnecessary for quite some time.
This is, of course, orthogonal to the problem of whether it ought have such independence in an abstract, principled sense of things.
The good news would be that they would no longer be subject to the Jones Act and could freely trade with the US mainland using normal boats like everyone else does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNqozQ8uaV8
Just because someone else would steel it, does not mean it belongs to you. What is this...kindergarten level morality.
It could be because I didn't make that claim of keeping it because someone else might take it. I only pointed out that someone will likely want it absent a US presence due to its strategic location.
Right...
> AC filters remove chlorine and certain pesticides and organic solvents that the RO membrane is not as effective in removing
It seems like as long as you have a complete water filtration system, you’ll cover most bases.
[1] https://inspectapedia.com/septic/RO_Waste_in_Septic_Systems....
Otherwise I agree with you. RO technology has mostly stagnated.
They sent me an excel sheet (fron 2013?) with information about tested sites. With the curious omission of measured levels.
It was explained as "levels are too low to be required for disclosure"
Hmmmm...
> This well, the Red Hill shaft, is one of three that provides water to residents on the Joint Base Pearl Harbor and Hickam (JBPHH) on the island of Oʻahu. For weeks, families living on the base registered complaints of a gasoline smell and taste in their water and illnesses ranging from vomiting to headaches, stomach pain, burning skin, and diarrhea. Initially, the navy dismissed residents’ concerns, but later admitted the water was unsafe for consumption and relocated more than 3,000 families to hotels. Because the navy shares an aquifer with the Board of Water Supply, officials worry that contamination in navy water wells could affect the city of Honolulu’s drinking water as well.
So: the people currently affected all live on the navy base. But the concern (not yet proven) is that this spill may affect the city water supply. Certainly concerning... do we know how to clean an aquifer if it becomes contaminated like this?
I'll add the caveat that the Navy's water system apparently reaches many houses and businesses that you wouldn't call "on the navy base." Watching that unfold was painful, like when a network goes down and the operators clearly don't know their own network. This includes housing neighborhoods for other military service members (i.e. Army, Coast Guard) who work elsewhere, run by a different property manager, and neighborhoods that were transferred back to the civilian community 10-20 years ago.
As mentioned in my other comment, what's most scary is that there's still no solid theory of what happened and when. We aren't sure of the chemicals, the amounts, the timeline, or the mechanism by which the chemicals got into the water. The story keeps changing, and never really adds up. So it does seem quite possible that the whole aquifer is at risk. The city plans to avoid drawing from this portion of the aquifer for several years now.
It seems any petroleum fueling infrastructure needs to be moved far far away from ground or surface water infrastructure.
I started a site at postpump.org to encourage land use updates to do this-- many municipalities have done it already.
It is a tragedy this keeps happening and the I am sure the federal government likes to play by different rules. Hopefully one day we can stop storing tens of thousands of gallons of petroleum right next to fresh water sources.
[1]: https://www.postpump.org/reports/
https://kutv.com/news/local/sandy-estimates-600-homes-affect...
And a follow up a year later:
https://kutv.com/amp/news/local/exclusive-cause-of-sandys-wa...
This is of course cherry-picked. And having a million smaller deployments is harder than one big centralized one. But the anecdote here is that even in a well-off, large suburb like Sandy, the infrastructure that is meant to “protect” the residents actually poisoned them.
It’s hard to say, IMO, that municipal run water on its own it guaranteed to be safe.
If there are cases where municipal water supplies are contaminated and it’s unknown for a while, then we need to address that by either changing federal laws, changing funding sources, or otherwise fix such issues for all.
It was just one example. But stuff like this does happen. Just the other day another nearby city mailed all its residents that there was a problem discovered LAST SUMMER, but all is fine because it’s fixed… now.
I don’t know what the solution is. But it’s scary when it happens.
Or something like https://www.eldoradosprings.com/ or https://rmbw.com/ or similar near you.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/us-crises-water-fli...
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-...
Edit: adding potential reliable source: https://inspectapedia.com/septic/RO_Waste_in_Septic_Systems....
Quite the strawman there.
Both private and public disasters can be attributed to either willful negligence, incompetence, or some combination of the two. In all cases there needs to be accountability via strong oversight and enforcement mechanisms.
Is it? I see it constantly on HackerNews posts, and it gets no pushback.
Generally, incompetence through complacency or lack of motivation or something like that. Though I’m sure you weren’t actually looking for an answer.
Here's a local news station's story on it, that might shine a human picture on what's happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvtbPAJ2hiQ
In my opinion, please know that what the dot-mil says in public may or may not have anything to do with their internal reasoning. The responsible parties internal discussion is shielded, and that leads to all sorts of results. There are hundreds of reasons, real or imagined, that might lead to "stalling" .. and don't forget, stalling is addictive, and accumulates!
At first, I figured that this was no big deal. We've dealt with water quality issues before in various places, using bottled water or boiling for a couple days, or just running the water until there was no visible sediment. I realized that this was more serious when other residents started reporting symptoms consistent with things that my family had experienced over the preceding weeks and months. The symptoms were mysterious and generally low-level, the kind that you would mention to your spouse but then write-off, rather than taking a sick day to see a doctor until they persist for a month. So we know that we were exposed to something nasty that we couldn't see, taste, or smell until it reached some peak around Thanksgiving.
What's most disconcerting is that we really have no idea how long we were exposed, to what chemicals, and in what amounts. I don't think we'll ever know, since rigorous sampling and testing and monitoring didn't start until after the Navy facilities folks started drawing water from a different well and flushing the pipes. Furthermore, there has been a pattern of Navy officials telling a story that everything is fine, and being evasive about the details, and then revising the story and releasing not-so-fine details later as a result of public outcry. Repeat several times. I don't even know what the working version of the official story is at this point. The Navy, Army (which also has many affected residents), and Hawaii Department of Health have issued starkly different guidance, forcing the Environmental Protection Agency to step in and mediate.
I actually considered submitting something on this to HN a few weeks ago, hoping to get opinions on the situation from some disinterested experts that hang out here. How bad might this be for us? Does any version of the story make sense?
The financial costs to the government will be staggering. Affected residents are getting paid for months of hotels, meals, and incidentals. We're submitting claims for damaged property items. The Navy has acquired dozens of huge filtration devices and flown them here overnight along with contractors to do remediation and consultants to inject expertise. All of this was over Christmas and the peak tourist season in Hawaii, plus COVID supply chain issues, at the highest possible prices.