Going with the flow
Regular readers know City Watch as an occasional segment in which we take a look at things around town that are broken (a rotting picnic table, a leaky water pipe, an unmarked trailhead), find out why they haven’t been fixed and let readers know who’s responsible. And if our initial coverage isn’t enough to spring officials into action, we’ll revisit problems over time until they’re resolved. Even though it sometimes doesn’t seem like it, the solutions do come. So we figure it’s only fair that we take the time to point out occasional steps forward, however small.
“This one’ll be fun,” we told Les Chang before our interview last week. He couldn’t help but laugh–and we can’t really blame him. As the director of the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation, Chang is all too familiar with City Watch, and has taken many of our phone calls about things around town that need fixing. But this time, we were calling Chang about the Dillingham fountain–you know, the one at the Diamond Head end of Kapiolani Park–which is flowing once again after months of being dry.
So maybe we just noticed it, but Chang tells us that the fountain has actually been back in action since March.
“The Dillingham Fountain was built in the ’50s or ’60s, so it’s an old fountain and it gets problematic from time to time,” he said. “I am not superstitious but I am tapping my wooden desk for this one because it had been on and off for a long time before this last time. We do the best we can to fix it.”
A slew of problems kept the fountain off from late summer 2008 through much of the winter of this year. There were small maintenance tasks–like replacing light bulbs and fixing filter dispensers–and bigger issues, like water problems and paint that wasn’t sticking properly. Despite its current working conditions, Chang says he knows City crews will be back down there before too long.
“If it was easy for me to say that we could prevent this fountain from breaking down, I would,” he said. “But this is the best we can do for a fountain this old and it’s getting to the point that we can’t afford to replace it. It’s a landmark, though. It’s beautiful.”
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