On April 25, the Department of Land and Natural Resources announced that it had conducted a sweep of encampments at Diamond Head State Monument, removing 43 camps from the crater slopes.
At the time, DLNR referred to "buckets used to hold human waste" littering Diamond Head. "No one knows if this material will flow into the ocean during rain," read a DLNR news release, which added that DLNR contractors did not remove those buckets because of health concerns.
Whether anyone will remove them is unclear. Aloha State Daily asked DLNR multiple times what is to be done with the buckets of human waste on state land, and received a simple answer: "our contractors do not remove the human waste," read an email attributed to DLNR homeless coordinator Pua Aiu.
The state Department of Health's spokeswoman Kristen Wong deferred follow-up questions back to DLNR.
Keoni Kino, co-founder of community cleanup group Kuilei Cliffs, said neither he nor his organization have since encountered any buckets of waste, but added that the encampments were located on different parts of Diamond Head than where Kuilei Cliffs operates.
"You would have to walk in to those specific camp sites to find those buckets," Kino told ASD via email. "Possibly in the future as we do more clearing we will come across those buckets of waste."
