What They Did — And How Long They Did It

1284 Kilauea K&M, LLC operated an underground injection well at 1284 Kilauea Avenue in Hilo, Hawai’i. An underground injection well, in plain language, is a system that pushes liquid waste — in this case, untreated sewage — directly into the subsurface geology below a property. Under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, operating one of these systems requires a permit. The company had none.

The violations were not a brief lapse in compliance. The EPA’s enforcement record confirms the illegal operation ran for over 19 years. That is not a typo. Through multiple presidential administrations, through the rise and fall of entire economic cycles, this company pushed raw sewage into the Hawaiian ground beneath people’s feet without a single day of legal authorization.

The operator named in the federal enforcement document is Scott Esser, whose address on the EPA record matches the contamination site itself — 1284 Kilauea Avenue, Hilo, HI 96720. The company brought in legal representation from Kobayashi Sugita & Goda, LLP, a Honolulu firm operating out of 999 Bishop Street, Suite 2600. When federal enforcement finally arrived, the lawyers were ready.

The Permit They Never Bothered to Get

Federal law under the Safe Drinking Water Act’s Underground Injection Control program exists for exactly one reason: to protect underground sources of drinking water from contamination. Hawai’i sits on volcanic rock. Water moves through it differently, faster, and more unpredictably than in mainland geological formations. Injecting raw sewage into that environment without oversight is a direct attack on the island’s water supply infrastructure.

The company’s decision to operate without a permit for nearly two decades is the central fact of this case. Obtaining a permit requires disclosing what you are injecting, where it is going, and demonstrating that it will not contaminate drinking water sources. Operating without one means all of that oversight simply never happened. Nobody monitored what went into the ground. Nobody tracked where it moved. Nobody protected what was downstream.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Measure

The official federal enforcement document describes this case in the clean, emotionless language of regulatory procedure. It references docket numbers, consent agreements, and statutory citations. What it does not describe in any emotional detail is what it actually means to live near a piece of land where raw sewage has been bleeding into the ground for nearly two decades without anyone stopping it.

Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawai’i, sits in one of the wettest urban environments in the United States. Rainfall is relentless. Water moves. It percolates through volcanic basalt, it finds cracks, it migrates. When you inject untreated sewage into the ground in a place like Hilo, you are not containing it. You are releasing it into a living, moving hydrological system. Every rainstorm becomes a potential vector. Every wet season is another year the contamination travels further than it did the year before.

The people who live and work in the surrounding area of 1284 Kilauea Avenue had no reason to know this was happening. Federal permit requirements exist precisely because the public cannot detect underground contamination with their senses. You cannot smell what is 40 feet below the surface. You cannot see groundwater migration from your front yard. The entire premise of the Underground Injection Control program is that this kind of harm is invisible — and therefore requires proactive, mandatory oversight. That oversight was denied to the community for 19-plus years because one company decided the permitting process was not worth the trouble.

There is a specific kind of betrayal embedded in environmental violations like this one. It is the betrayal of proximity. The person listed as the operator on the EPA enforcement document, Scott Esser, lived at or operated from the very address where the contamination occurred. The harm was not abstract or distant. It was happening at the same property, at the same coordinates, for nearly two decades. The people most likely to have been affected first were the people closest to it — and they had no way to know.

Hawai’i’s indigenous communities have fought for generations to protect the land and water as sacred, living systems. The concept of mālama ʻāina — caring for the land — is foundational to Hawaiian culture and to the political movements that have pushed for environmental justice across the islands. When a company injects raw sewage into Hawaiian ground for 19 years without permission, it is not committing a neutral regulatory infraction. It is actively degrading a place that holds deep cultural and spiritual significance to the people whose ancestors have called it home for over a thousand years.

The Consent Agreement and Final Order filed on July 16, 2025, concludes the EPA’s enforcement proceeding. That conclusion does not restore what was put into the ground. It does not retroactively monitor where the contamination traveled. It does not compensate the people who drank water, gardened, or raised children near that address during the years the company operated illegally. The legal process has reached its end. The environmental and human consequences have not.

Legal Receipts: Straight From the Federal Record

Every quote below comes directly from the U.S. EPA Region IX enforcement document. No paraphrase. No embellishment. The government’s own words.

Societal Impact Mapping

Environmental Degradation

Hawai’i’s geology is fundamentally different from the continental United States. The Big Island sits on some of the youngest volcanic rock on Earth. Basaltic lava fields are highly permeable. Groundwater in this environment does not sit in neat, contained aquifers — it moves through fractured rock at rates that would be considered extreme in most other geological settings. Injecting untreated sewage into this substrate for 19-plus years does not create a localized contamination event. It creates a slow, spreading, invisible pollution plume.

Raw sewage carries pathogens including E. coli, Salmonella, hepatitis A virus, norovirus, and a range of parasitic organisms. It also carries nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — that cause algal blooms and aquatic dead zones when they reach coastal waters. Hilo sits on Hilo Bay. The island’s groundwater discharge flows toward the ocean. Every gallon of untreated sewage injected into the ground at 1284 Kilauea Avenue for nearly two decades was on a potential path toward the marine ecosystem that surrounds the island.

The company operated without a permit, which means no environmental baseline was established at the start of operations, no monitoring occurred during the 19-plus years of illegal injection, and no assessment of migration or plume spread was conducted as a regulatory requirement. The full environmental damage from this operation is, by design of the company’s own actions, unknown. The absence of a permit did not just violate the law — it guaranteed that the environmental harm would never be fully mapped.

Public Health

The Safe Drinking Water Act’s Underground Injection Control program was created specifically because underground injection of waste poses a direct threat to drinking water. In Hawai’i, where municipal water systems draw on groundwater and where private wells remain common in rural areas, that threat is tangible and immediate. Untreated sewage in the subsurface geology near Hilo is not a theoretical concern — it is a pathway to contaminated drinking water.

Pathogens found in raw sewage cause acute illness. Contaminated drinking water causes gastrointestinal disease, kidney failure in vulnerable populations, and — in cases involving hepatitis A or certain strains of E. coli — life-threatening conditions. Children, the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems face the highest risk. The people living and working near 1284 Kilauea Avenue during the years of illegal operation were never warned, never monitored, and never given the chance to protect themselves.

Because no permit was obtained, no health-based monitoring requirements were ever triggered. No government agency was formally tracking what the company was putting into the ground or where it was going. The regulatory system that exists to protect public health was entirely bypassed for 19-plus years. The community absorbed whatever risk the company created — with no information, no warning, and no recourse until federal enforcement finally arrived.

Economic Inequality

Environmental violations of this kind do not occur in wealthy, politically connected communities without consequence. The history of environmental enforcement in the United States documents a consistent pattern: illegal dumping, unpermitted waste injection, and hazardous operations overwhelmingly concentrate in low-income communities and communities of color, where political power to demand accountability is structurally limited. Hilo, Hawai’i has a median household income below the state average and a population that is majority non-white.

The economic cost of environmental contamination falls on residents, not on the companies that create it. Property values decline near contamination sites. Healthcare costs rise for communities dealing with waterborne illness. Local fisheries and marine recreational industries — critical to Hawai’i’s economy — absorb losses when coastal waters are degraded by nutrient runoff and pathogen discharge from inland sources. The company that operated the illegal injection well for 19-plus years externalized every one of these costs onto the surrounding community.

The consent agreement process — where a company negotiates terms with regulators to conclude an enforcement action — by its nature produces outcomes that reflect the company’s ability to pay and litigate, not the full scope of harm caused. The community affected by 19-plus years of illegal sewage injection was not a party to that agreement. Their costs, their health risks, and their degraded environment were settled between a company, its lawyers, and a federal agency. No community representative signed the document filed on July 16, 2025.

The Cost of a Life: What 19 Years Buys

What Now? Who’s Watching

The EPA’s enforcement action has formally concluded. But the conclusion of a legal proceeding does not mean the work of accountability is done. These are the actors and institutions that carry responsibility going forward.

What You Can Do Right Now

File a public records request. The full text of the Consent Agreement — including any penalty amount and remediation terms — is a public document. Contact the EPA Region IX hearing clerk directly and request the complete filed document. The address is 75 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105.

Contact Hawai’i state representatives. The state legislature has authority to strengthen local enforcement of environmental violations and to require independent groundwater testing near sites where federal enforcement actions have been filed. Call your state representative and demand it.

Support Hawai’i environmental justice organizations. Groups like the Life of the Land organization and community water protection coalitions on the Big Island do the on-the-ground work of monitoring contamination and holding polluters accountable between federal enforcement cycles. Local organizing is the only thing that catches these violations before they run for two decades undetected. Find them. Support them. Show up.