Lower Hamakua Ditch Was Part Of Grandiose Design for Valley

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When the Lower Hamakua Ditch was formally opened on July 1, 1910, it was the occasion of two days of banquets, speeches, and merry-making for investors and plantation owners. Newspapers in Hilo and Honolulu reported the occasion extensively. Coverage in The Pacific Commercial Advertiser of Honolulu was especially comprehensive. Not coincidentally, the Advertiser’s publisher, Lorrin A. Thurston, was one of the principal investors in the ditch, and also in the railroad company that at the same time was laying a line from Hilo to Honoka`a.

To report on the festivities, Thurston assigned Albert Pierce Taylor, a figure well enough known to have his own presence noted in the other newspaper accounts of the day. Taylor was not a man sparing of word — at least not in his paean to the boss’s latest investment. His account in The Pacific Commercial Advertiser of July 3, 1910, starts on Page 1 and continues for several back pages. Adding no little drama to Taylor’s dispatch was an event that occurred on the eve of the formal opening ceremony: “A flume crossing one of the gorges had been destroyed… It was a blow from out of the darkness from an unseen enemy which stunned the hardy Danish engineer [Jorgen Jorgensen, who designed the system]… Jorgensen felt sure there was no engineering miscalculation, no structural defect. His figuring had been exact, even when the 3,300-foot tunnel was driven from each opening for then the two gangs came together half a mile under a peak so exactly that measurements found only a quarter of an inch variation…

“Jorgensen mounted a horse and rode through the driving rain along the dizzy trails and worked all night. The following morning the message came from Jorgensen that the flume was crashed by a great boulder falling from the face of the pali far above the flume, and there was no structural defect or engineering miscalculation. It made hearts light again, especially when the report came also that the break would be repaired in less than a week.” (In fact, the break took nearly three weeks to repair.)

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The Hawaiians

At this point in Jorgensen’s narrative emerges the fact that Hawaiians at the time appear to have had misgivings about the project. It is one of the rare references to Hawaiians in the thousands of column inches devoted by the press of the day to the ditch’s opening.
“To the mind of the Hawaiians who came to witness the ceremony of dedication,” Taylor wrote, “the thought came that the goddess of Waipi`o had made her final protest against the imprisoning of the waters of her domain by unloosening a boulder high up in her castellated home and with unerring aim hurled it directly into the center of the flume, crushing it like an eggshell. So true an aim would hardly be known in a thousand throws of the goddess, but it was her final, forceful effort to undermine the work of the puny men who had scarred and burrowed into her dominions.”

Workers hastily dammed up the tunnel after the broken flume, so that the ditch effectively began carrying water out of the valley at the Koiawe intake, “so that,” Taylor continues, “after all, the flow was uninterrupted, only diminished.”

In any case, whatever most Hawaiians thought about the 50-ton boulder destroying the flume, one Hawaiian woman, Rebecca Kaukahi of Kukuihaele, was found to bless the ditch’s opening. Kaukahi, described as “an aged Hawaiian woman,” chanted a mele the next day, “a fitting tribute to the waters which came from a region so full of folk-lore and tradition. The assembled guests listened to the quaint chant and those who understood Hawaiian applauded her effort. It was a tale in figurative language, this mele, composed in honor of King Kalakaua upon the occasion of one of his trips to Hamakua, in which he was compared to the sun which sheds its blessings over the earth and upon mankind.”

Taylor expanded on this episode: “The chanter explained that the reason she sang this mele was because God was showering blessings on mankind, and more particularly on Hamakua. This was the water of Waipi`o, she chanted, which for ages has flowed in darkness, doing but little good, leaving Hamakua thirsty. God in His goodness sent the missionaries to Hawai`i, which was the time of the beginning of the breaking of light over the land. The light has continued to spread until God in His goodness increased the light to such an extent until the people of Hawai`i were allowed to become a part of the great and powerful United States of America, and now the people of the great America had taken the water out of the darkness of the valleys and from the earth and put it into the light where all could see it now pouring from this tunnel mouth to bless the people of Hamakua who will now no longer be thirsty.”

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Loss of Life

So far as can be determined from the public record, three people are known to have lost their lives directly as a result of the building of the ditch. In July 1909, an engineer, Thomas F. Kelly, drowned (with his horse) in Waipi`o Valley as he was returning from Kukuihaele with supplies (as reported in the Hilo Tribune of August 3, 1909). A month later, a Japanese laborer was “pinned down by a large rock falling on him; he died shortly after the accident,” according to a report in the Hilo Tribune of September 7, 1909. There may have been yet a third death. In the account of Taylor, mention is made of a Japanese workman who, during the cutting of a trail across the face of the pali, was struck by a falling rock, “and he tumbled to death hundreds of feet below.”

Oral histories — not invariably reliable — report a dozen or more deaths occurred during the ditch’s construction. These same oral histories report, erroneously it seems, that the bulk of the workmen on the ditch were Chinese or Korean. Company records and news reports, however, indicate that work was done almost exclusively by Japanese laborers, under the supervision of Caucasians.

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High Hopes

A century ago, the men who built the ditch had even more grandiose plans for Waipi`o Valley water. In remarks delivered to the Hilo Board of Trade just days after the opening of the ditch, and reported by the Hilo Hawai`i Herald of July 14, 1910, Thurston stated that over and above the expected increase in sugar yields from irrigated fields, “the owners of the ditch have further plans for storing water in the great gulches of Waipi`o Valley, some of which are so shaped that they may be dammed to store fifty to seventy-five million gallons, with a very light expense.
“Through the expenditure of about $400,000 they expect to store enough water to have an enormous reserve and also to be able to get 8,000 horsepower from the water running out of these reservoirs, which will be used to pump water from lower levels into the ditch and for general power purposes.”

Some months earlier, the Hilo Tribune carried a report indicating that the electricity would be used to manufacture fertilizer for use on the Hamakua plantations. Bearing a dateline of Honolulu, but citing no source, the March 26, 1910, Tribune article stated that the fertilizer would be “manufactured from nitrogen extracted from Hawaiian air and fixed with lime manufactured from Hawaiian coral.” All this was to take place, the article said, “in the not far distant future. The establishment of an artificial nitrate plant is included among the plans of the Hawaiian Irrigation Company, owners of the Kohala and Hamakua ditches, and the sites for at least five power plants have been determined on…

“It is planned, as far as the scheme has been matured, to locate the nitrate plant at the mouth of the Waipi`o Valley, but should it be found that no landing place can be made there the power will be carried to Kawaihae and the plant placed on that side of the Big Island.”

A.P. Taylor’s effusive article also spoke of these grand visions: With the dedication of the ditch, he wrote, “comes the tentative announcement that more of the waters of the Waipi`o Valley running to waste into the ocean are to be corralled into reservoirs…[which] will be made capable of holding enormous supplies of water at a sufficient height to develop power for generating electrical energy to be sent to many parts of the great island of Hawai`i.” Taylor, attributes authorship of this dream to John T. McCrosson, who, Taylor wrote, had the idea more than 30 years earlier to build the ditch itself. Indeed, Taylor continued, McCrosson was “to leave soon for Norway,” where he planned to look into the use of water power as a source of electricity for “fixation of atmospheric nitrogen.”

1. Taylor must have been a character in his own right. A brief biography of him appears in The Mid-Pacific Magazine of June 1911, in which Taylor writes of the ongoing naval construction projects at Pearl Harbor. Taylor is identified as having worked for The Advertiser for 10 years. He campaigned in Washington in 1896 for the repeal of the gold standard, and, the biography continues, “Later he joined the Cuban revolutionists and was arrested by the Spanish, imprisoned at Havana by General Weyler and deported. In 1899, as a newspaper man, he was aboard the army transport Siam, off Luzon, that was almost engulfed by a typhoon…, For two years, Mr. Taylor occupied the position of chief of detectives in Honolulu.”

Volume 6, Number 2 August 1995