“Heal Puna” is a chant before it is anything else. In our song of the same name, one voice calls “Heal Puna,” the crowd answers, and then comes a second call: “Protect the water.” It is short on purpose. If you live in Puna and have ever wondered what is under your yard, the song is really asking one thing: where does it go?
The opening lines of the song are a plain statement of how water works: “What enters the earth returns through the water. What we place beneath our homes does not simply disappear.” This post takes those lines seriously and checks them against what the State and the University of Hawaiʻi have actually found.
Mauka to makai, in a very literal way
A cesspool is a pit that lets household wastewater soak into the ground with almost no treatment. Hawaiʻi has about 83,000 of them, and about 48,600 are on Hawaiʻi Island, which together release an estimated 29 million gallons a day into the ground.
Puna sits on some of the youngest rock on the island, which is full of cracks and tubes. Researchers at UH Hilo have timed what happens to wastewater in this kind of rock. At Puakō, on the dry Kohala coast, dye put into home systems showed up in shoreline springs in as little as six hours. At Keaukaha, near Hilo, it reached the shore in 20 hours to three days. Those studies were done at Puakō and Keaukaha, not in Puna, and we are not aware of a published dye study for a Puna neighborhood. The point is the pathway: young lava rock moves water fast, and groundwater runs toward the sea.
- Mauka
- Cesspool
- Groundwater
- Shoreline springs
- Makai
What the State found in Puna
In its 2017 report, the Department of Health named Keaʻau as the one Hawaiʻi Island area where cesspools posed the greatest risk to drinking water. It counted about 9,300 cesspools there, little soil to filter them, and many homes that rely on private wells. A DOH investigation found that 25 percent of the domestic wells it sampled in the area tested positive for bacteria that indicate wastewater. The same report listed Kapoho, with about 220 cesspools, as a place where tide pools are open to land-based pollution.
The State’s newer ranking tool, which sorts every cesspool by how close it is to drinking water, streams and the coast, puts about 84 percent of Hawaiʻi Island’s cesspools in its Priority 3 tier, including all of Puna, Kaʻū and Hāmākua. Priority 3 is not a diagnosis. It is a way of ordering the work. Every cesspool in Hawaiʻi has the same deadline in law: 2050.
Priority 3 is not a diagnosis. It is a way of ordering the work.
“No shame, no blame”
The line in the song that matters most is the plainest one: no shame, no blame, just the next right step. Cesspools were not a scandal when most of these homes were built. They were ordinary, legal and cheap, and Hawaiʻi did not ban new ones until 2015. Two years later the Legislature required every remaining cesspool to be upgraded, converted or connected to sewer by 2050.
That is the reason the song says “home by home, street by street.” There is no single project that fixes Puna. There are tens of thousands of properties, each with its own lot, soil and distance from the water. Statewide, only about 400 cesspools a year have been converted, and at that pace the job would take more than two centuries. A neighbor who starts the process, and talks about it, makes it easier for the next house.
What “the next right step” looks like
For a homeowner, it is usually smaller than people fear. First find out where your property stands: whether you have a cesspool, which priority tier your area is in, and how close you are to water. After that, a licensed engineer designs a replacement, the Department of Health reviews it, a licensed contractor builds it, and DOH gives the final approval. We explain that sequence step by step in What actually happens when you replace a cesspool?.
Funding is the honest hard part. There are no State or County grants right now. The Legislature created a low-interest loan fund in 2026 (Act 204), but the Hawaiʻi Green Infrastructure Authority is still setting it up and is not taking applications yet.
ʻĀina Force does not engineer, permit or build anything. Licensed independent engineers and contractors do that work. We help homeowners, those professionals and the State keep information moving so the process doesn’t stall between steps. If you live in Puna and want to know where you stand, Start My Property Check. It is free and takes about a minute.
The song ends the way it began, with the water. “What we love, we protect. What we heal, we become.”
