J. Davitt McAteer, the former federal mine safety official tapped to lead a West Virginia state investigation into last week’s disaster at the Upper Big Branch coal mine, was a well-known name in Hawaii for a brief period in 1971.

I recalled his local notoriety while listening to NPR news about the mine investigation yesterday morning, and made a stop at the McCully-Moiliili Library in the afternoon to refresh my memory.

McAteer, then 26 and a recent law school graduate, was one of “Nader’s Raiders”, the group of activist law students who took on investigative projects under the direction of crusading consumer advocate Ralph Nader. A University of Hawaii student group brought McAteer to Hawaii for a semester to increase student involvement in environmental issues. It wasn’t long before he succeeded big time.

McAteer arrived in Honolulu in February 1971 and immediately organized students into study groups examining water pollution, military land use, interlocking corporate directorships and the concentration of power. In less than two months, they prepared a simple, 4-page pamphlet describing threats to Hawaii’s fragile environment, including overdevelopment, heavy pesticide use (which later prompted a major legislative investigation of the chemical heptachlor in the pineapple industry and its effects on public health), and the dumping of Honolulu’s sewage into the ocean (are you listening, Mayor Hannemann?). Political and industry leaders were criticized for failing to take action.

The pamphlet was largely a restatement of common themes that had been raised previously by local activists and might have been largely ignored except for the fact that the pamphlets were released by Nader’s offices in Washington and mailed to mainland travel agencies. And I recall that pollution warning signs were posted along Waikiki Beach, although I didn’t seem that mentioned in the few clippings I retrieved yesterday.

It hit the big time when distribution of the pamphlet was noted by the New York Times (March 28, 1971), which called it a “sharply unfavorable ecological profile”.

The Nader brochure asserts that the Hawaiian tourist industry has done little to reduce pollution which, it is charged, threatens such famed resort areas as Waikiki Beach and Keehi Lagoon. The brochure says that 55 million gallons of untreated sewage from the city of Honolulu is flowing each day into the Pacific Ocean through an underwater outfall only four miles from Waikiki Beach.

The local establishment was outraged. Governor Burns denounced the pamphlet as full of errors, Senator Hiram Fong blasted it from D.C., and even Congresswoman Patsy Mink called it “irresponsible”, and said she was “deeply disappointed” by Nader’s role in the affair.

Sen. Francis Wong, who chaired the legislature’s higher education committee, launched an investigation in the $9,000 in university funds used for the project, including $6,000 for McAteer’s salary during the five-month project. Then-UH President Harlan Cleveland asked for a halt in distribution of the pamphlet and requested names and addresses of previous recipients. Cleveland also publicly questioned whether McAteer was really associated with Nader’s organization.

Local environmental activist and Life of the Land founder Tony Hodges stepped forward in McAteer’s defense.

“The people in the ecology movement are in this to survive, not to make friends,” Hodges told the Honolulu Advertiser.

Then Nader sent John Esposito, described as a personal assistant, to Honolulu to join the fray.

Esposito told reporters he had come to find out why the Hawaii establishment was more concerned about publication of the pamphlet than about the substance of its assessment of environmental degradation. Esposito also said Nader would fight any attempt by UH to cancel McAteer’s contract.

Then the UH Manoa campus newspaper, Ka Leo, reprinted the pamphlet’s contents in a direct challenge to the UH president’s attempt to stop further distribution.

Ka Leo Editor Ken Kobayashi said the 10,000 copies went quickly.

Ka Leo urged students to send copies to their favorite travel agencies.

“No one has heard from the people, the students, the senior in philosophy who likes to surf and doesn’t want to surf in sewage,” Ka Leo wrote.

“We were out (of copies) by 10:30 a.m.”, Kobayashi said at the time.

Cleveland’s ban was officially lifted following a three hour meeting attended by Cleveland, UH executive vp Richard Takasaki, McAteer, and Esposito. An Advertiser story reported that six volunteer attorneys and State Rep. Richard Garcia waiting in the hall outside the meeting to assist McAteer, if necessary.

McAteer’s wife later told the NY Times:

When you’re trying to shake up responsible people, you can write letters to the editor and that’s acceptable, and it does no good. You can write columns in the papers and that’s acceptable, and it does not good. So you look for a jugular vein and you threaten it, and that does some good.”

The pamphlet also got mentions in Time Magazine and led to a Life Magazine spread on environmental issues in Hawaii later in the year.

The furor slowly faded. McAteer was hospitalized for bleeding ulcers, but finished out his contract.

And the sewage is still flowing into the ocean nearly 40 years later. It’s no longer raw sewage, but the practice of dumping the partially-treated sewage into the ocean is the center of a long-standing and costly dispute with the EPA.