On the beach

Kyo-Ya Corp., owner of the four Sheraton/Westin hotels in Waikiki, wants to bring back the missing beach in front of the Sheraton Waikiki. The company has an idea of how to do it but has taken some pains not to simply announce it, because a lot of attempts to re-engineer Waikiki and other shorelines have failed in the past, and a lot of people are skeptical when someone says he can build something that will prevent the ocean from taking back the new sand and depositing it on the reef. Surfers, whose opinion is informed by plenty of knowledge of how the waves break, have not taken an official view yet, though some of them wish engineers would stop trying to control nature. Supporters of making a fresh attempt to rebuild the beach say some structures do soften the wave action and the resulting erosion. Waikiki is a concave beach -- it curves inward -- and the Sheraton Waikiki sits at the most inward point, with virtually no beach at all. There used to be a beach there but waves pulled the sand away. What Kyo-ya is thinking about, apart from pumping a lot of sand from the reef back onto land, is building three "groins," basically Y-shaped rock wharves, similar if not identical to what was build at the tip of Magic Island. Nina Wu wrote a really good article about this in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. (There are some excellent reporters working for the Bulletin, for the Honolulu Advertiser, and for my alma mater Pacific Business News, and I'll mention them here from time to time.) Many of us tend to oppose any attempt to do a shorefront buildout -- it feels like the right position to take, environmentally speaking -- even though it is decades too late to do anything "natural" in Waikiki. On the other hand, engineers always seem convinced that their next idea is foolproof, and this has often proven not to be the case when it comes to diversion of currents. To avoid getting too deep into the local situation I'll give you a mainland example. The Army Corps of Engineers spent generations shoring up the banks of the Mississippi River to prevent flooding. The result is a river that flows so fast and strong that when it does flood, the floods are inevitably devastating, way worse than before; and the rich sediment that used to nurture adjacent farms now flows all the way into the Gulf of Mexico. In other news... The organizers of Tuesday's JobQuest job fair estimate that 3,500 people came to the fair seeking jobs. Another 500 worked at the employer exhibits. I spent more than two hours at the fair and noticed something interesting: people were a lot better dressed than at previous fairs. Also, for some reason a lot of employers were looking for accountants. The Fed cut interest rates twice as much as expected and created a global stock rally. But one expert told CBS interest rate cuts are like potato chips -- you need more than one. This gives a whole new meaning to crunching the numbers.