Hawaiians blue as beach ebbs on the tide

But now Waikiki Beach, the Pacific island’s best-known and most valuable tourism gem, has become a victim of its own phenomenal success and is literally disappearing into the ocean.

At the alarming rate of a foot a year, the golden sands are being trodden into the sea, prompting the island’s government to put in place an emergency recovery plan which will blight the stunning coastline throughout this year’s summer season but which they hope will halt the damage.

And the authorities are also warning more needs to be done to regulate the huge numbers of visitors to the American outpost or its other stunning attractions, such as the Diamond Head mountain which towers above Honolulu, will suffer irreparable damage.

Around 10,000 cubic metres of sand from a bank 700 metres offshore are to be pumped into three areas of the golden curve of beach which are under the most immediate threat of disappearing entirely. Since 1985, approximately 20ft of the beach has been lost.

The project, which is due to start in March and will cost around 300,000, will involve sand being brought ashore via a giant floating pipe.

Peter Young, chairman of Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources, said: "This is the beginning of a major effort to make improvements to one of the world’s most famous beaches. Waikiki is one of the gems of Hawaii, and we are looking forward to a more beautiful and more stable beach in the near future."

Previous projects to try to preserve the beach have been described as "hit and miss" by the authorities with the construction of concrete seawalls and rock areas to try to keep the sand ashore.

Sam Lemmo, administrator of the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, said: "The tourist traffic does contribute to dragging the beach profile down and in a normal beach environment we’d see the wave action pushing the sand back up, but there’s so much traffic that it’s being overwhelmed.

"What you have to remember is that Waikiki beach is largely artificial. It was constructed by the state in the 1930s and through the 1950s and ’60s, hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand were deposited there. The issue today is maintenance and in the last 30 years there hasn’t been much of that, which isn’t good for the tourism industry."

To add to the authorities’ problems, global warming has also seen the sea level rise. Hawaii as a whole is likely to see a 20-inch sea level rise by 2100. On that basis the cost of maintaining the island’s beaches could be as much as 3bn.

Lemmo has conducted extensive research into Waikiki Beach and believes a lot of earlier efforts to protect the sand were experimental and didn’t always work. When that happened, they just "tore it out and tried something else," he said.

The state’s latest plan includes three approaches; the short-term pumping of the sand on to the beach; a medium-term scheme to remodel some of the local underwater structures, through the construction of breakwaters and T-shaped walls; and a longer-term plan, that is reliant on federal funds, for continuous work on the beach to protect it in the future.

In the short term, however, the tourists are going to have to put up with the machinery on the beach, according to Rex Johnson, president of the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

He said: "Yes, the pipe will be sitting out there in the bay, but in order to keep the product revitalised we’ve just got to do it.

"It will be a bit of an eyesore, but the same as any other infrastructure work that is done on the islands, like when an old hotel comes down."

Japan is the largest source of foreign tourists for Hawaii, with some 1.3 million Japanese holidaymakers visiting last year. Tourism chiefs aim to increase that number to more than 1.5 million this year. Around 120,000 Britons made the long journey to Honolulu last year.

Because so much of the islands’ revenue is dependent on the tourism industry, there has clearly been a significant impact on other local sites, such as Diamond Head, the mountain that towers over Honolulu and is climbed by many thousands of visitors each year.

"When you consider those areas, you’re getting into capacity and the question of whether tourism is now eroding the basis of what people come here to see," said Lemmo. "There have been discussions on that, but as yet we’ve reached no conclusions. It’s obvious that people do have an impact on the environment."

King's paradise

THE glamorous Waikiki Beach has featured on television and film screens numerous times, with perhaps one of the best-known being in Elvis Presley’s seventh film, Blue Hawaii.

The first of his ‘Hawaii Trilogy’, the musical comedy became the most successful film of the King’s career and it provided the debut for his hit single ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’.

Elvis stars as Chad Gates, who has just returned to his family’s pineapple plantation from the Second World War. His parents are eager for him to pursue the family business but Chad chooses instead to work as a guide in the tourist agency where his girlfriend Maile (Joan Blackman), is also employed. His new vocation not only allows him to use his knowledge of the island’s most beautiful sites, but also affords him enough time to cavort on Waikiki with his native Hawaiian buddies. But tension mounts as Sara Lee (Angela Lansbury), Chad’s blue-blooded mother, objects to his job, his girlfriend, and his beach-loving friends.

Girls! Girls! Girls! and Paradise, Hawaiian Style followed this box office success to complete the trilogy.