sons and your premises clean, your lives would be clean, and God, that giveth health, will abide with you, and not turn away.” (Gibson)
In 1897, Rudolph Hering, a New York Sanitary Engineer, designed Honolulu’s sewer system; it was a “separate system” whereby separate networks of conduits would carry sewage and storm waters, a system still used today in Honolulu.
Work on the system began in 1899 and sewer lines were laid out in a gravity flow pattern in a rectangular fashion and ran along Alapaʻi, River and South Streets, past Thomas Square, and ended in the Punahou area.
The sewer outfall to the ocean was built in 1899. The outfall ran some 3,800-feet out to sea at a depth of 40-feet of water, rather than farther out to a 100-foot depth (due to funding constraints.) (Darnell)
In 1900, the Kakaʻako Pumping Station was constructed; with features such as large arched windows, exterior walls of local lava rock, roofs of green tile and a smokestack 76-feet tall.
The use of the Kakaʻako Pumping Station was abandoned by the City and County of Honolulu when it built a new pumping station on the southwest portion of the block, adjacent to the Historic Ala Moana Pumping Station in 1955.