HAS THE ILLEGAL US OCCUPATION OF HAWAI`I WORKED?
Waikiki Beach Is Totally Man-Made & Disappearing
Huffington Post - March 9, 2015
Tourists in bikinis and board shorts packed onto the narrow strip of sand fronting the iconic Royal Hawaiian and Moana Surfrider hotels on a recent weekday. Dozens of novice surfers lurched to catch waist-high waves in the turquoise water.
It’s a scene that has played out for decades at the world-famous beach that lures several million people a year to Waikiki, generating about 42 percent of the state’s visitor industry revenue.
But the beach stretching to the Kuhio Beach Basin, where a bronze statue of famous surfer Duke Kahanamoku welcomes visitors with outstretched arms, is in danger of disappearing.
A crumbling, century-old stone wall that juts out from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is in imminent danger of collapsing, say scientists. The groin is the sole reason sand remains along this main stretch of Waikiki Beach.
Without it, the beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian would likely disappear in a matter of days, said Dolan Eversole, a scientist with the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant program. It would take several months to a year for the rest of the stretch of sand to erode.
Most visitors may not know it, but Waikiki Beach is almost entirely man-made. It has had erosion problems since the late-1800s when developers began erecting hotels and homes too close to the natural shoreline and building seawalls and other structures that blocked the natural ebb and flow of sand along the beach.
By 1950, more than 80 structures, including seawalls, groins, piers and storm drains, were counted along the Waikiki shoreline, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report.
Efforts to combat the resulting erosion have been haphazard, however, and with sea level rise now claiming about a foot of the beach a year, the threat of losing Waikiki Beach has become more dire.
“Waikiki is arguably as important as a slice of the H-1 and if a part of the H-1 needed maintenance there would be no question that we would go and maintain it, repave it, fill potholes,” said Chip Fletcher, a coastal geologist and associate dean at the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology. “Well, that is what we are doing to Waikiki Beach -- it’s maintenance. If it costs millions of dollars, there is abundant economic justification for that.”
The groin jutting out from the Royal Hawaiian isn’t the only structure in danger of collapsing. Many of the old shoreline structures in Waikiki weren’t engineered to modern standards and are at risk of failing, according to scientists.
And some of the beaches along Waikiki have been gone for years, including parts of Kaimana and Gray’s Beach and an area on the Ewa side of the Natatorium. Just a few years ago, water was flooding the bar at the Moana Hotel because there was no beach left, noted Eversole.
