Wetland eyed to clean Garapan beaches

The Division of Environmental Quality is proposing the creation of a pedestrian mall by creating a wetland on one of the areas in Garapan that would be made to appear like a landscaped pond system, similar to that of Disneyland.

Brian Bearden, DEQ’s environmental engineer, said a feasible area would be the 7.1-acre public land between two big hotels by the beach in Garapan.

Bearden presented this in the CNMI’s 1st Environmental Symposium at the Diamond Hotel Monday, before local and federal officials and other delegates.

“Garapan has the worst water quality in the CNMI,” he said, saying that the district is where Saipan’s most polluted beaches are. “In terms of the number of water quality violations per year, it usually has more than any other beach, and that’s been the case since we’ve been monitoring.”

This, he said, is due to a drainage that has been in place since the Japanese period in the Marianas, that discharges runoff from the Central Garapan district to the beach.

Although the Department of Public Works cleans the drainage occasionally, according to Bearden, beach waters in the Garapan area frequently violate DEQ standards.

“You need some land to be able to treat any kind of runoff because you need to be able to take that runoff, store it somewhere, and pass it through some sort of treatment process and then discharge it,” Bearden said.

The proposed site is the location of the Nakamoto Hotel project, which did not push through, he said. It is located between the Dai-Ichi Hotel and the Hafa Adai Hotel.

“DEQ is not going to be building this thing, but we’re trying to get the whole variety of government agencies together,” Bearden said. “Members of the Office of the Governor are looking into this right now.”

“Our next step now is to discuss with the Office of Public Lands (now Marianas Public Lands Authority) what the status of that lot is there, and whether or not a project like this would be acceptable to them, and we’ll try to explain to them why it’s in our opinion necessary if they want to treat the runoff there, if they want to fix the beach problems,” he added.

He detailed that the treatment system would be a constructed wetland, where water would flow through a series of ponds, planted with aquatic vegetation such as reeds, mangroves and other “swamp-like things”.

“But it can be done in a very nice way where it wouldn’t be like a swamp. It would be more like a pond state,” the engineer said.

Bearden said Disneyland and gold courses have similar set-ups to treat storm water. He said the DEQ is endorsing this treatment method so that the land around the pond system can be used for other beneficial purposes.

“It can be turned into a sort of a landscape pond system. It leaves the land open for some kind of development, and the example I used was to put in a bunch of small shops and restaurants around it, to make it a sort of a pedestrian mall around a water feature,” he said. “But there could be other things that can be done in there.”