Lydgate Beach Park is one of the most cherished family beaches on the island of Kauaʻi — a place where keiki (children) learn to swim, surfers chase clean waves, and community gathers. It should never be a dumping ground for untreated sewage.
But right now, a draft permit from the Hawaiʻi Department of Health (DOH) would allow the Wailua Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) to continue discharging up to 1.5 million gallons of partially treated sewage into the ocean just offshore of Lydgate Beach. Even worse, the proposed pollution limits are so high, they violate both federal Clean Water Act protections and Hawai‘i’s own public health standards for recreational waters.
The Wailua Wastewater Treatment Plant is an aging sewage treatment plant built in a floodplain and tsunami inundation zone with a history of failing pipes and sewage spills. This facility has needed an upgrade for over a decade and cannot accommodate the growing hotel industry on Kauaʻi. The draft permit allows the facility to discharge partially treated sewage just 500ft off-shore of Lydgate Beach Park in water only 20ft deep! That is less than 1.5 football field lengths from dry sand!
To make matters worse, prevailing currents, tradewinds, and wave action in the area are likely to push polluted discharges back to shore. The closest beach to the outfall, Lydgate Beach Park is a heavily frequented spot by tourists and local families alike for swimming, surfing, kiting, windsurfing, fishing, and other ocean-based activities.
What’s Actually in the Draft Permit?
Let’s break it down: the draft Clean Water Act discharge permit for the Wailua Wastewater Treatment Plant has some serious problems. Follow link to the draft permit.
- It allows the facility to dump partially-treated sewage that hasn’t been disinfected into the ocean at Lydgate Park at a level that poses a huge risk to public health.
The ocean at Lydgate Beach Park is popular for swimming, surfing, spearfishing, diving, and other recreation. The state sets strict water quality standards to limit pollutants in recreational waters where people swim, surf, fish, and dive, to protect public health. Specifically, Hawaiʻi and all other coastal states restrict enterococci fecal indicator bacteria to protect human health from exposure to fecal pathogens (nasty viruses, bacteria and other stuff that can give people the stomach flu, infections and other water-borne illnesses).
The state limits, which mirror the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA's) recommendations, restrict the daily maximum enterococci to 130 colony forming units per 100 milliliters (cfu/100mL) to protect people from exposure to fecal pathogens. The draft permit allows the sewage treatment plant to discharge up to 7,150 cfu/100 mL enterococci bacteria per day! You don’t have to be a mathematician or scientist to see how shockingly high these proposed limits are compared to the safe levels. By green-lighting the facility to discharge 50 times more bacteria than the state and EPA have found is safe for swimming and other water recreation, the permit puts public health at risk.
Why is such a high concentration of fecal indicator bacteria even being considered for this permit? The facility has asked to have these high limits because sometimes it can’t disinfect its sewage. In fact, twice so far in 2025, the facility discharged more than 8,000 cfu/100mL of enterococci bacteria!
Why doesn’t the facility just fix the issue instead of putting public health at risk? Great question! We are demanding the state set the enterococci bacteria limits at a safe level for swimmers and others who recreate in the water and to require the facility to fix its disinfection problem.
Children enjoying the calm waters at Lydgate Beach Park, Kauaʻi.
- The permit ignores an existing problem with murky water at Lydgate Park.
The state regularly assesses our beaches and waterbodies to see if they are meeting water quality standards or not. If a waterbody is not meeting standards, it is considered “impaired” for that pollutant. When a waterbody has a pollution problem, discharge permits that are issued need to ensure that any proposed discharges do not raise levels of that 'impaired' pollutant, or basically make the problem worse.
The beach at Lydgate Park has an existing problem with murky water and has been deemed by the state as “impaired” for turbidity. This means that the sewage treatment plant’s permit should be at least as strict as the state water quality standard, so the facility's discharge doesn’t make the problem worse. Unfortunately the draft permit sets a high limit for turbidity, meaning the discharge is likely to make the existing problem worse. We are asking the state to set turbidity limits that match the water quality standard.
- The permit tries to “fix” a nutrient pollution problem with questionable math instead of technology improvements.
Back in 2013, the state flagged that there was a problem with the facility discharging too much nutrient pollution. The sewage treatment plant couldn’t meet the water quality standards (which set a safe amount of nutrient pollution allowed in the water to protect aquatic life), so the state set a ten-year compliance schedule for the facility to meet the standard. Part of that plan required the County to do a study in 2015 about options to fix the problem. The 2015 study identified several ways to lower the nutrient pollution from the sewage treatment plant. This is important because coral reefs that support coastal ecosystems and protect our beaches across Hawaiʻi from erosion and coastal storms are very susceptible to nutrient pollution and can easily get choked out by algae overgrowth stimulated by high levels of nutrients in the water. We have seen this happen far too many times.
Unfortunately, instead of upgrading the Wailua Sewage Treatment Plant’s technology to fix the problem, the facility hired an engineer to do a study using questionable math that argued that the ocean is so vast that all the nutrient pollution would get washed out to sea and would not be a problem. So in 2019, instead of making sure the facility could meet the nutrient water quality standards, the state removed all nutrient limits for the facility. In place of discharge limits, the permit required the facility to test the ocean four times a year to show there was no nutrient pollution problem.
The result? The ocean at Lydgate Park is now...wait for it... impaired for nutrients! Yes, there are now too many nutrients in the ocean at Lydgate Park. Yet the draft permit allows the sewage treatment plant to continue discharging unlimited amounts of nutrient pollution and only requires nutrient monitoring four times per year. We are asking the state to limit nutrient pollution from the sewage treatment plant.
This Permit Violates the Law
Surfrider Foundation’s legal and scientific review found that this permit:
- Violates Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules, which require enterococci and turbidity limits to meet recreational water quality standards at the point of discharge
- Ignores the state’s public trust responsibility, written into the Hawaiʻi Constitution, to protect nearshore marine waters for current and future generations
- Fails to provide proper monitoring, as many required tests can be taken when the plant isn’t even discharging
Surfrider is Demanding a Better Permit
Surfrider Foundation is urging the Hawaiʻi Department of Health to reject the current draft permit (Read Surfrider Foundation official comments here) and require the County to:
- Set legally enforceable limits for bacteria, nutrients, and turbidity,
- Eliminate zone of dilution loopholes for enterococci,
- Require real-time water quality monitoring at the discharge point when the facility is discharging,
- Ensure full disinfection of all effluent before any ocean discharge, and
- Engage the public and honor our right to clean, safe coastal waters.
The Kauaʻi Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has been working hard to spread the word about this permit and has been asking community groups and members who enjoy recreating at Lydgate Beach to submit public comments against the ill-advised plan to continue dumping partially-treated sewage so close to shore without any reasonable limits to protect public health. Local media coverage hopefully will also add further pressure on the state to reconsider the Clean Water Act permit for the Wailua Sewage Treatment Plant.