ProPublica — Officials Let Hawaii’s Waterfront Homeowners Damage Public Beaches Again and Again

Erosion from recent storms caused South Ocean Grove Circle to collapse in the Chases Ocean Grove neighborhood of Dennis Port.Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff

Dec 31, 2020

By Sophie Cocke — Everybody knows that seawalls cause beach loss, and Hawaii law forbids building them. But Honolulu County officials have granted exemptions to 46 homeowners over the past two decades even as a quarter of Oahu’s beaches have disappeared.

In the winter of 2013, 45-foot waves barreled toward Oahu’s North Shore. The storm surge sent water gushing up a public walkway between Dean Hanzawa’s two beachfront homes. The ocean sucked sand and soil away from the yards and pulled a wall fronting one of the homes into a 45-degree angle toward the ocean, causing the property’s yard to split in half.

To protect his property, Hanzawa brought in an excavator and dumped mounds of boulders along the public beach fronting the homes, forming large, sloping walls along the shoreline. He then piled boulders in front of the walkway, the public’s only corridor to this stretch of beach in Mokuleia, a coastal community rimmed by shimmering, turquoise water. To hold the rocks in place, he covered them with concrete.

Hawaii’s laws bar property owners from building seawalls. Scientists say such structures are the leading cause of beach loss throughout the state and have caused roughly one-quarter of Oahu’s beaches to disappear over the past century.

But Hanzawa argued that removing the seawalls would cause harm to his property, and in 2018, after a lengthy regulatory process and over the objections of some neighbors, the County of Honolulu granted him an environmental exemption that allowed the walls to remain on the beach.

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