Kawaihae to Mauna Lani Keeps Getting Water Notices. What's Going On With the Lālāmilo System?

Since October 5, 2026, every Department of Water Supply customer in Kawaihae, Kawaihae Harbor, Hāpuna Beach Resort, Mauna Kea Beach Resort, Puakō and Mauna Lani Resort has been under an Essential Use Only notice. It asks people to use water only for drinking, cooking, sanitation and hygiene "while DWS repairs its wells." As of October 26 it was still the newest South Kohala item in the department's October archive, and nothing later had been posted.

If this feels familiar along the coast, that's because it is. The same six communities have shown up on the same affected-areas list over and over since December 2025. The problems have changed from notice to notice, and the list has stayed the same. A dry yard and a pool you can't top off are now a normal part of the year on the Lālāmilo system.

What "Essential Use Only" Covers at Home

This is the strictest level the department has used on the coast this year. It replaced a milder restriction from just three days earlier. The notice lists what is fine and what to put off:

• Still fine: drinking, necessary sanitation, cooking and food prep, necessary personal hygiene, and other essential household or health needs
• Hold off on: irrigation and lawn watering, pressure washing, washing cars or boats, filling pools or spas, and any other unnecessary high-volume use

The reason is storage. Holding back now keeps water in the tanks for every customer while crews work on the wells. The notice stays in effect until conditions improve, and DWS says it will tell customers when normal use can resume. Nothing in the October notices sets a fill station, an end date or a penalty schedule. For a lanai garden in Puakō or a landscaped lot at Mauna Lani, that means waiting it out.

A Year on the Same Six-Name List

Taken one at a time, each notice looks like a short disruption. Put in order, they show a system that has been under some limit for long stretches of the past eleven months.

The March update shows the earlier problem lasted. More than three months after the December notice, the coast was still at a 25% reduction while repairs went on. The required irrigation cut had eased from at least 50% to at least 25%, but the restriction itself was still in place. The September cancellation brought only a short break. Four days after DWS told the coast normal use could resume, a new restriction came out, and three days after that the department moved to essential use only.

This all comes on top of the older pattern Kohala Coast households know from dry years. On August 9, 2023, DWS asked the Lālāmilo system for a voluntary 10% cut after the South Kohala brush fires pushed demand past what the wells could pump. That request stayed in place until February 12, 2024. Dry-weather notices for nearby service areas came in October 2025 and February 2026 as well. They covered a different list of communities, mostly upslope around Waimea and the Lālāmilo Farm Lots, so they don't belong in the coastal count.

Three Causes, One Bottleneck

Read the stated reasons in order and three separate problems show up. In 2023 the cause was demand during a fire emergency. In December 2025 and again this October it was the wells themselves. In September it was electricity.

All three come back to the same constraint. The coast depends on pumped groundwater, so it has only as much water as the pumps can deliver at that moment. Any of those three things can cut into that supply.

The power side gets less attention, and Civil Beat laid it out in its August 31, 2026 report on Hurricane Lala. According to Civil Beat, DWS runs 23 separate water systems with about 70 wells and dozens of booster pumps. All of them rely on Hawaiian Electric, and the department has 18 emergency generators. When the grid went down during Lala, water service stopped in places from Kalapana to Hāwī in North Kohala. DWS manager and chief engineer Keith Okamoto told Civil Beat that the department has added three large generators in the past two years, "but we cannot duplicate the Hawaiian Electric system. We don't have that much capacity."

That helps explain the September stretch on the coast. The Nolo-related notice ended when power came back. In the cancellation, the department said it "continues to strive to improve its operational resiliency and redundancy."

The October notices name no storm. Their reason is well repairs, and like the December 2025 notice, they don't say which well or how long the repair will take.

The Reservoir Adds Storage, Not Pumps

The biggest local water project of recent years is the Lālāmilo 10-million-gallon reservoir. Hawaiʻi Public Radio reported on the groundbreaking in December 2023. The contract for the $19.8 million project went to Isemoto Contracting. HPR described it as a way to improve system reliability and add storage for fire protection, with completion estimated about two years out.

On that timeline the reservoir would have been finished around the end of 2025. That's about when the current run of coastal notices started. None of the 2026 notices mention it, and the department's public notices don't say whether it's in service.

Even when it is fully running, a reservoir holds water that wells have already pumped. More storage gives the system more time when a pump fails or the power goes out. It doesn't replace a well that has stopped working. Both essential-use notices this fall were about protecting what was already in the tanks, which is the job storage does.

What to Watch Through November

The Essential Use Only notice remains until DWS says otherwise. When it lifts, the notices so far suggest it may step down to a percentage restriction before normal use returns. That's how the March notice worked. The September cancellation, by contrast, lifted everything at once. For Kawaihae, Puakō and the resort communities, these are the things to watch:

1. The cancellation or downgrade notice. DWS posts each one on hawaiidws.org, using the same six-community list as the October 5 notice. The department's number for questions is 808-961-8790.
2. Whether the next notice names the well. The December and October notices both describe repairs without identifying the source. A notice that names a well and gives a repair schedule would say more than the last several have.
3. The irrigation figure. In this year's restrictions, landscape water has been either cut twice as hard as household use or held to the same 25%. The irrigation percentage in the next notice will show how much room the system has.
4. Reservoir status. Whether the Lālāmilo reservoir is finished and in service is a fair question to ask DWS directly, since it shapes how long the coast can last through the next pump or power failure.
5. The Water Board agenda. The Hawaiʻi County Water Board posts its agendas on the DWS site. The June and September 2026 manager's reports listed North Kona Wells, not Lālāmilo. A Lālāmilo item on a future agenda would put these coastal repairs in front of the board.

If you own on the coast from far away, the irrigation limits are a good reason to check what your landscaper or property manager has set your timers to. A notice that lands while you're off-island won't change a controller nobody has touched.

Before he worked in real estate, Kekoa Akana spent close to ten years as a certified home inspector on Hawaiʻi Island. He can show you how a home's water setup holds up through a season of notices like these, from irrigation zones to pool fill lines to backup storage. If you'd like to talk through what this year on the Lālāmilo system means for your Kohala Coast property, Kekoa Akana is glad to help. Schedule a Private Consultation.