Detect a Leak

So being on the Sierra Club (SC) Executive Committee has a few perks, or rather responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to attend certain events and be a face for SC. I volunteered to do this for the Detect-a-Leak Week event. Detect a leak week is something the Honolulu Board of Water Supply started and SC has supported for a number of years. The idea is to raise awareness and get people to fix leaking faucets and such to save water. O‘ahu has a fairly tight water budget. Being a small volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific we can’t just import water from the Colorado River. So conservation is a good thing and SC supports conservation and the proper management of watershed areas to promote groundwater recharge. We have some desalination pilot projects but nothing too big. It seems too expensive to do large scale desalination, especially when conservation can solve many/all of our problems. Funny thing is that there are these businesses the sell desalinated deep ocean sea water. They are located at and get their deep cold sea water from the National Energy Laboratory of Hawai‘i Authority (NELHA), desalinate it and then sell it in Japan.

SC also supports transit, but doesn’t talk about it too much. I think the rest of the SC Executive Committee see transit as sort of a double edged sword and want to avoid being too supportive of the project or the Mayor. Obviously I like the project and thing SC should support it, regardless of how they feel about the mayor on other issues. It took a long time to get the Executive Committee to agree that I could speak at a pro-rail rally, provided I just identify myself as a SC member, not an Executive Committee member. So I spoke at the rally and gave the SC spiel and whooped up the crowd. Actually, I didn’t do too much whooping because right after me they had a few local radio DJs come up and take care of that.

Anyway here are a few photos from the Detect-a-Leak Week ceremonies – the political photo-ops.

Here I am with the City Council. My representative is the woman (Ann Kobayashi) behind and to the right of me. She is running for mayor now and orchestrated her announcement to run for major in such as way as only one guy, her friend apparently (Duke Bainum), was able to submit paperwork to run to replace her. The guy most people wanted to run (Kirk Caldwell) did not get his paper work in on time so we do not have a choice in the election. Silly.

So here we are with the major. The "we" is the Board of Water Supply people and representatives from other organizations and business supporting the Detect-a-Leak event. The major is the tall guy in the middle.