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This story is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
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.
This has happened time and again in Honolulu County, which oversees Oahu, the state s most populous island. Officials there have granted so-called hardship exemptions to 46 homeowners over the past two decades, allowing them to build new seawalls, keep walls that were constructed illegally and rebuild walls that have crumbled, according to an investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica.
This year, the news organizations have reported on the various ways in which coastal homeowners have used loopholes to circumvent Hawaii s environmental laws, winning exemptions to protect their properties at the expense of the state s beaches. Some get permission from the state to keep existing seawalls through easements, wherein homeowners essentially pay the state to lease the public lands under the structures. Others get state approvals to use sandbags and heavy tarps, which can have the same damaging effects as seawalls. The Hanzawa case illustrates how some owners are able to circumvent coastal protections at the county level.
While the state is the official guardian of the public shoreline, which extends to the high wash of the waves during the time of the year when the ocean pushes farthest inland, counties control land use policy on the other side of that line, where private property begins. Because some seawalls are located inland and others straddle both jurisdictions, property owners often have two avenues for obtaining environmental exemptions. And Honolulu County has a track record of being more permissive.
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