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Huge swaths of Honolulu once were brackish wetlands fed by springs and torrents of fresh water from the Koolau mountains, though you’d never know it today.

Waikiki, Moiliili, Kalia, Ala Moana, Iwilei and parts of Kalihi Kai were watery expanses protected by slim barrier beaches and placid reef flats. Dry land was once so far inland, Hawaiians stored canoes at a place they called Pawaa, meaning canoe landing, near the corner of King and Punahou streets.

In the course of 20th-century urbanization, the mountain streams, prone to flash flooding, were girdled in concrete channels. The streams and their estuaries were filled, buried and bridged. But those actions didn’t solve flooding from the streams — they just moved it.

Of the great streams, only Nuuanu is accorded much respect or visibility as it crosses downtown Honolulu’s flats. The rest — Kalihi, Kapalama, Makiki, Manoa, and Palolo streams — may as well not be there, except during storm floods, when they remind us what they do.

Now, in light of a few ruinous past floods, and in anticipation of more frequent storms as the globe and its oceans warm, the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to manage the risk of flooding in east-central Honolulu. Potential flooding from three streams — Makiki, Manoa, and Palolo — threatens not only Waikiki, Hawaii’s livelihood, but several heavily populated, low-lying mauka areas of the city, all of them former wetlands.

I decide to look closely at Palolo stream, which, viewed from the west rim of Wilhelmina Rise, high above the Palolo valley, is just about invisible among the neat, tightly laid-out roofs of the community.

The sound of a machete whacking underbrush animates an otherwise quiet morning at “the Plantation,” a grove of mango, banana, and breadfruit trees along the west bank of Waiomao stream in the upper Palolo valley.

The fruitful plot is a nexus for Palolo Homes, the once-notorious, Section 8-subsidized complex of two-story apartment buildings that houses about 1,200 residents.

Since well before the Homes were handsomely renovated in 2003, the community, mostly low-income Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, has engaged in a notably successful self-help effort, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM) education and training. Part of that effort has been to take learning for children and adults outdoors — and to assume stewardship for the two streams, Waiomao and Pukele, that run through the neighborhood and converge at the property’s makai edge to form Palolo stream.

More than 200 members of the community took part in an annual stream cleanup last September, says Dahlia Asuega, the resident services manager for the Mutual Housing Association of Hawaii, the non-profit owner of the Homes.

“It’s something that simply has to be done.” — Dahlia Asuego, services manager, Mutual Housing Association of Hawaii.

“We do it just because,” she says, as we sit at a shady picnic table at the Plantation. “No huge advertising, no paid help; it’s something that simply has to be done. Liability can get in the way, and I have to applaud Mutual Housing for supporting our efforts.”

Asuega, who’s part-Hawaiian and lives in the Homes with her Samoan husband, says volunteers regularly weed and replant natives along the streams’ banks, as well as “drag out all kinds of stuff —tires, furniture, fencing, batteries, bikes — especially after heavy rain.”

We walk through the Plantation a few hundred feet and down the slippery banks of the Waiomao stream, where the water runs clean, knee-deep in mid-channel, through its natural, boulder- and vine-strewn banks. A near-vertical mile or so upstream is the stream’s source, in the bog at Kaau crater, the circular volcanic pond atop the Koolau ridge.

A few yards downstream from the Plantation, a clogged weir holds back a thick mass of plant debris while the water flows through into a 40-foot-wide concrete box channel. Its bottom is canted into a shallow vee where the stream runs shin-deep over its mossy bed. Ten-foot vertical walls, topped with chainlink fencing, rise to the back yards of the modest house lots. Like most Hawaiian streams, the Waiomao is known for its extremely dangerous and “flashy” (as in, flash flood) nature.

A hundred yards downstream, the channel joins with the likewise channelized Pukele stream to form the Palolo stream; it winds through Palolo’s suburbs in its own fenced concrete channel, sunken and barely noticed, except by graffiti artists, for about a mile and a half. Four street bridges cross it. Occasional clumps of cane grass and Job’s tear grass, their roots lodged in the concrete’s cracks and seams, add a bit of green to the grim, man-made waterway.

The stream reverts to its natural state at the west edge of the valley, where a deeply carved, boulder-studded gulch wraps around the bluff below the Chaminade University and St. Louis High School campuses. It resumes channelization behind City Mill, then again reclaims its natural channel as it meets up with Manoa stream adjacent to Koali Road, mauka of Waialae Avenue, where a small parking lot and an open, overgrown mini-meadow mark the convergence.

From there, it’s a more-or-less straight shot makai to the Ala Wai Canal, along what is ignominiously called the Manoa-Palolo Drainage Canal, a 1.3-mile, unlined ditch built in 1935. Looking downstream from the confluence is like looking through a dystopian tunnel, with four tightly arranged bridges and overpasses — Waialae Avenue, H-1, King Street and Kapiolani Boulevard — thundering overhead.

The canal’s banks along the west edge of Kaimuki High School’s playing fields to Date Street have been cleaned up. They present an almost bucolic riparian appearance; apartment buildings and single-family homes with their little yards line the opposite bank. Below the Date Street Bridge, the canal does a westward dogleg to pass between Iolani School’s campus and the Ala Wai Golf Course, finally emptying into the Ala Wai Canal.

Palolo Homes’s 20-year stewardship of Pukele and Waiomao streams is among the few remnants of a movement that began in 1996 with a consent decree, between the state and city, to create a plan for watershed protection. That was followed by a $2.1 million, EPA-instigated campaign “to empower the community to improve … the Ala Wai Canal and the many watershed areas that drain into the canal,” according to an EPA press release.

The watersheds covered by the project included Makiki, Manoa and Palolo. A coalition of community groups called the Ala Wai Watershed Association led the effort. It proposed forming a legally powerful watershed district administered by the city. The association presented seminars, printed fact sheets and newsletters, educated Honolulu kids through field trips and in-class presentations. Groups organized stream clean-ups.

The consensus seemed clear: The best way to reduce flooding and silt, to improve water quality and boost the habitat for fish in the stream and for the people who live near it was to restore the stream beds as close as possible to their natural conditions. That meant restoring upland conservation-zoned forests and streams, engineering settling ponds to catch silt, installing stream-side bike paths, and ripping up the concrete channelizations.

But things petered out after funding dried up. EPA ended its program in 2005.

“Private property ownership was problematic,” recalls longtime community activist and former Palolo resident Lynette Cruz during a phone interview. Cruz was active in the AWWA.

In Hawaii, she explained, private, stream-side properties have legal rights to a stream’s centerline. Owners weren’t too happy about work-crew volunteers — or the general public — gaining access to their backyards, especially in Manoa but also in Palolo. “So, we could only work on public parts of streams, by the bridges,” Cruz says.

“But we figured education first. We had to make the community aware of our streams. People had to be persuaded to get involved.”

For a while, the propaganda blitz worked. The idea of a watershed district was established. But then, Cruz says, volunteers dropped out of AWWA as the money dried up.

“You know, we all had this nagging question — how do you fix the wrongs without returning the streams to the way they were?” — Lynette Cruz, community activist.

“You know, we all had this nagging question — how do you fix the wrongs without returning the streams to the way they were?

“That’s never going to happen.”

In 2000, when the Ala Wai watershed issue was percolating into the public consciousness, then-Gov. Ben Cayetano raised a ruckus by proposing that the state-owned, city-managed, 146-acre Ala Wai Golf Course be converted to a great public park; and that a suitable replacement public golf course, maybe on Sand Island, be created — or purchased — to take up the slack.

“Every great city has a significant, meaningful park,” the governor said at the time, citing New York’s Central Park, Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

David Blane, chief of Cayetano’s state planning office, argued that the new park should incorporate reconstituted wetlands. The Manoa-Palolo Drainage Canal could be diverted through them to slow down the water and spread it out, reducing the silt and other pollutant-laden run-off that otherwise would wind up in the already scandalously polluted Ala Wai Canal.

“To me, that’s the most exciting element,” Blane said at the time.

But outraged — and politically connected — duffers organized to defend their 18 holes, and the Legislature summarily rejected Cayetano’s plan.

“I hope these golfers that are opposing this take a look down the road and see what our needs will be 10, 15 years from now,” Cayetano told Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Gordon Pang.

The park idea hasn’t been floated since, though I’ve often fantasized about it, driving down Date Street and looking through the bare chainlink fence at all that underutilized open space.

On a Wednesday night last September, about 100 people showed up at Washington Middle School while the state Department of Land and Natural Resources and the Corps of Engineers  presented their  for a proposed flood-risk management project for the Ala Wai Canal. The groundwork for this Ala Wai Canal Project can be credited to the EPA and AWWA’s efforts.

A concise  cited past floods in Waikiki and Manoa — and the anticipated devastation to central Honolulu that would occur during what’s known as a 100-year flood event.

To prevent the devastation, the Corps’ project leader, Derek Chow, outlined a $173 million project whose major features would include a 4-foot-high flood wall, set back from the existing, 90-year-old Ala Wai Canal walls, that would run along both sides of the waterway. Amid a few groans and gasps from the audience, Chow noted that “views from (the Ala Wai Boulevard) will be affected.”

A series of six dammed “Debris/Retention Basins” would be constructed in the upper reaches of Makiki, Manoa and Palolo streams, including one on Pukele stream and one on Waiomao stream. These reservoirs, which will require condemnation of private property in some cases, would hold water back during peak flood events to reduce downstream damage.

“We believe there’s general support for the project,” Chow told the attentive audience. Sixty-five percent of the funding would come from Congress, with the rest coming from the state of Hawaii.

Ecosystem restoration was “shed” as a goal, Chow admitted, although he did say there would be an effort to “soften the engineering of the existing channelizations.”

Public comment on the draft EIS will be accepted by the Corps until Nov. 9. According to the timeline, construction would begin in October 2021.