Task Force: Hawaii Needs To Remove Thousands Of Cesspools Sooner Than Planned 1 Many families can’t afford the conversion costs, and coming up with the funds to rid the state of all those cesspools will be daunting.
Hawaii currently has an official goal to replace all of its cesspools with better sewage treatment systems that cause less harm to the local environment and public health by 2050.
But with as many as 83,000 cesspools releasing some 53 million gallons of untreated sewage into the islands’ soil, streams and nearshore waters each day, waiting another three decades would be too late.
That’s the recent conclusion of the state task force that’s investigating the pervasive problem. The Cesspool Conversion Working Group on Wednesday called for nearly 14,000 of the worst Hawaii cesspools – the ones that could potentially cause the most damage based on their location – to be removed by 2030.
Another batch of more than 12,000 “priority two” cesspools would be gone by 2035 under the new plan. A remaining “priority three” batch of some 55,000 cesspools would then be removed by the original 2050 deadline.
