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NO DAY AT THE BEACH. There may be worse phrases to hear when you’re planning a trip to the beach than “brown water advisory,” but we can’t seem to think of any just now. Thousands of tourists and locals last week got an up-close-and-personal look at the manifestation of that phrase when 129,000 gallons of sewage poured into coastal waters on Monday from manholes near Ala Moana Park.

There were multiple causes for this incident, which was mostly resolved in two days — storm rains causing heavy strain on an area where one of two main pumps was offline and drainage systems heavily clogged by storm debris, chief among them.

With the operational pump overwhelmed, officials waited until Monday morning to begin several hours of work to bring the other pump online, with its much larger capacity. But it was far too late, and very quickly, hundreds of thousands of gallons of what should have been in drainpipes was instead surging out of manholes, flowing into ponds and canals and ultimately winding up in coastal waters.

“Would you rather swim with human feces or possibly with animal feces? That’s where we’re at right now,” said Shayne Enright, spokeswoman for the Emergency Services Department. “We can’t make it any clearer than that.”

The Civil Beat Editorial Board would prefer to swim with no feces. We suspect we’re not alone in that inclination, and everyone might have had exactly those optimal conditions, if city staff members had followed the very advice they deliver to the public in advance of big storms: Make an emergency plan and get prepared.

In this instance, they might have assumed that heavy storm rains would overwhelm their smaller pump and taken steps more quickly to bring the larger pump online to mitigate a large-scale spill. The cost of that action pales in comparison to the expense of the cleanup combined with the cumulative brand damage caused by headlines around the world on the sewage spill in Waikiki.

Weeks remain in our annual storm season, and with repairs not yet completed on what is known as Ala Moana Pump Station No. 2, Honolulu officials need to have a better plan for handling possibly similar scenarios in September and October.

SKEPTICAL JUSTICES. If the tenor of questioning during oral arguments at last Thursday’s state Supreme Court session on the Thirty Meter Telescope controversy is any indication, TMT supporters shouldn’t expect construction to resume anytime soon on the troubled project.

Justices were unexpectedly tough on state attorneys on the question of why the state Board of Land and Natural Resources gave “preliminary approval” to the University of Hawaii’s permit for TMT even though a public request for a “contested case” hearing had been made. Such hearings are required before a permit can be approved, and the state argues that it didn’t issue final approval until the contested case process had been completed.

The justices didn’t seem to buy it.

“I was a trial judge for a long time, I don’t recall ever making a decision where I decided the case before the trial,” said. Justice Richard Pollack.

Another justice argued that Land Board rules make no provision for a “preliminary approval” process, and Pollack said Land Board rules would not have allowed the board to revoke the preliminary approval if UH had lost the contested case before a hearings officer.

Though other matters in this case are significant — including whether the state is properly managing the conservation district atop Mauna Kea — the due process questions that underlie the preliminary approval of UH’s permit are perhaps the most important. They go to the heart of concerns of some Native Hawaiians that in matters such as these, the deck is consistently, unfairly stacked against them.

TMT may well be legally within its rights to move forward with construction atop the mountain, as Gov. David Ige has said. But if it is determined that the process that afforded them that legal right was fundamentally flawed, that not only would erode support for an astronomically important and worthy scientific project, but confidence in our legal system overall — a possibility that Justice Sabrina McKenna seemed to speak to, eloquently, during the questioning.

“Justice can perform its function in the best way only if it satisfies the appearance of justice,” said McKenna. “Justice must not only be done, but manifestly seen as done.”

Though this case has not been decided, the justice’s questions provide telescope opponents with the comfort that the perception of a flawed process is not limited to them.

ACT SCORES. By measure of the second year of mandatory ACT testing of Hawaii’s high school juniors, only 1 in 10 members of the Class of 2015 are likely to be entering their senior year with the proficiency they need to succeed in college in the four critical subjects of English, reading, math and science.

The good news is the ACT scores were better in 2014 than they were in 2013. The percentage of students meeting college readiness benchmarks in English rose by 3 percent, while those meeting math, reading and science benchmarks each rose by 1 percent to 3 percent.

released earlier this year showed small gains on standardized testing, including the ACT, that might be attributable in part to the Common Core curriculum standards. In one of those studies (research in Kentucky funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), students experienced small gains similar to those found in Hawaii last year. But the jury is still out, and clearly more research needs to be done, as the Common Core implementation continues to deepen in Hawaii and around the country.

The ACT organization acknowledges that students who don’t meet benchmarks in all four areas can still succeed in college. Those who score well in at least three areas are “likely to be successful” in college, research has shown. By that measure, nearly one-quarter of Hawaii’s class of 2015 might rightly be considered prepared for success.

Better than 1 in 10, certainly. But even under that more favorable analysis, three-quarters of our graduates aren’t ready for college.

Hawaii schools did not get into this situation overnight, and won’t emerge from it that way, either. The 2014 scores offer encouragement that modest, incremental gains and perhaps more are possible if we stay the course and focus on the Common Core standards that will increasingly inform the ACT and other standardized tests.

Educators, administrators, parents, students and others who care about the impact of education on our communities and economy should feel an abiding sense of urgency about the great numbers of graduates who aren’t ready for the next step. Incremental gains are important, but none of us will be able to feel great about Hawaii schools until many more of our students have the preparation they need to earn the ticket that is increasingly required to participate in the 21^st century economy: a college diploma.