KILAUEA — A mystery pipe has sent Kauai’s Department of Water on a scramble to find the owner before the upcoming scheduled 9-hour Kilauea water shutdown, but county officials say it isn’t expected to change the timeline of the overnight
KILAUEA — A mystery pipe has sent Kauai’s Department of Water on a scramble to find the owner before the upcoming scheduled 9-hour Kilauea water shutdown, but county officials say it isn’t expected to change the timeline of the overnight project.
Tonight, water in Kilauea will be shut off at 8 p.m. and will stay off until 5 a.m. Friday morning to allow the DOW’s contractor, Earthworks Pacific Inc., to connect to a new water main. That new water main will provide water system improvements to the Kilauea Elementary school area, according to a press release.
Dustin Moises, construction project management officer for the county, said the goal is to do the project with minimum impact to Kilauea residents. School is out on Friday, so students won’t be impacted, and the plan is to get the water back on in time for residents to get ready for work.
Monday, two days before the project was set to begin, Moises said his crews were probing to make sure there wasn’t anything unexpected underground that would impede the project.
They found something.
“We found an extra pipe that’s not ours, so we have to figure out who it belongs to,” Moises said. “It shouldn’t throw off the timeline, though, we have two days to figure it out. We’d just rather catch [the owners] now, than in the middle of the night.”
Moises said he’ll be putting four crews, a total of 25 workers, on the ground tonight, in order to wrap up the project before their 5 a.m. deadline.
“That’s a lot of people for something like that,” Moises said. “We should be OK. If something crazy happens, it’s unforeseen.”
