Sinkholes spread in troubled Pearl City cemetery, even as improvements are made

PEARL CITY (HawaiiNewsNow) – For years, Sunset Memorial Park Cemetery has had to battle with vandals and trespassers. Now, a gate is helping to keep them out.

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However, there’s a new problem that has surfaced after the Kona lows sent floodwater through the cemetery.

The problem: sinkholes that appeared in the cemetery following a storm in January. Dozens more appeared after the storms in March.

Larry Veray, the president of Friends for Sunset Memorial Park Cemetery, showed some of the sinkholes.

“That goes down about seven to eight feet,” he said as he showed one of the holes. “I was putting a camera down there so I could take a look at it.”

Most of the sholes go down about three feet and then move horizontally beneath the surface.

A video Veray took after the Kona low storms shows water coming out fo the ground at the cemetery.

“I counted 35 (sinkholes), and other side, there’s another 15 to 20,” he said.

Veray said century-old caskets used to collapse and cause sinkholes at gravesites, but this is new. He says something else is now a factor at Sunset Memorial, which fell into disrepair after the last owner died about 13 years ago.

“There used to be watercress farms and rice paddies and lo’i all through this area, so that means that there’s an underground source of water,” said Pearl City state Rep. Gregg Takayama.

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He said there will be more neglected cemeteries in the future, especially on the neighbor islands, as more churches that have cemeteries shut down.

There’s a newly-established state Cemetery Office, but it doesn’t oversee abandoned properties like Sunset Memorial.

“The cemeteries that the state does upkeep for, they were turned over to the Territory of Hawaii,” said Takayama. “There have been no more cemeteries that were taken over by the government since then.”

Veray has explored ways to fill the sinkholes without causing more damage of desecration to the burials.

“What they recommend is to find where the hole is, where it’s being sucked out, and pour concrete in there,” said Veray. “I can’t get a concrete truck in here to do that.”

Veray said he’ll like have to find some good dirt to fill the sinkholes, a process that he says will take months of fundraising and work.

He and a group of volunteers have already used a $125,000 grant to repave the roadway through the cemetery, install new fencing, and to put up a gate that he found on Facebook Marketplace.

New water lines and other infrastructure improvement are in the works, as well as solar panels to generate electricity that can be sold to neighbors and generate revenue for the cemetery’s upkeep.

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That to-do list now includes filling those sinkholes.