I guess my years with Scott, an environmental engineer by training, has gotten me thinking about stuff like drinking water. I was wondering how this relatively small and crowded island has enough drinking water for everyone, and how they obtain and store it.
The Honolulu Board of Water Supply has some pretty good information on their site. Their is an interactive piece on the Water Cycle that describes how water fills Hawaii’s aquifers and dikes (miles long sealed underground compartments that lava came up through when the island was forming), and how they get it out by digging artesian wells and tunnels to the dikes.
There’s also an interesting page about Oahu’s Water History. Briefly, the native people has strict laws to ensure that the water could support the hundreds of thousands of people that lived on the island. Then, when Westerners arrived and introduced artesian wells, there was a brief water boom, but irresponsible well-digging eventually led to a major drought on the island, which prompted government control of the water supply.
