LAHAINA – It has taken almost five years from application to action, but the demolition of Pioneer Mill is well under way.

Jeff Rebugio of Kaanapali Development Co. said Friday that the removal of the three dozen structures at the mill is “about 35 to 40 percent done.”

Sometime late this month, the contractor, Iconco Inc. of Oakland, Calif., will have to close down busy Lahainaluna Road for a few hours to dismantle the conveyor system that tied the sugar mill to its power station up until the mill shut down in 1999.

Rebugio said a Saturday probably will be selected, to avoid the heavy school traffic on Lahainaluna Road.

The distinctive smokestack will remain, with the Kaanapali Development Corp. saying it will restore the upper 14 feet that had to be knocked off because the top was too badly deteriorated. The preservation plan was ordered last month by the Maui County Cultural Resources Commission.

Despite a lot of regrets and wishes for adaptive reuse, the rest of the mill – the collection of warehouse-type buildings – could not be saved.

In recent years, the site has been used by homeless squatters, and there were fires in the buildings in 2003 and 2005, as well as continual damage to the abandoned structures. Rebugio says he believes the squatters have stopped sleeping at the mill, but he does not know where they have gone.

The demolition really began early in 2002. In December 2001, Kaanapali Estate Coffee, which had tried to continue for a time after sugar was shut down, auctioned off its field and shop equipment.

Winning bidders returned early in the New Year to dismantle traveling cranes and other pieces of heavy industrial equipment.

With the innards gone, there was not much left to consider saving, although the Maui County Cultural Resources Commission and the Planning Department kept hoping as late as 2004 that something could be arranged.

The factory buildings were mere sheds for the most part, not substantial buildings that could be rebuilt the way the Pioneer Mill business offices were turned into a senior center.

So far, says Rebugio, the work has been limited to dismantling above-ground structures. Steel scrap is being shipped off island for recycling. Concrete will be ground up and reused, at least in part, for new building projects on Maui.

When subsurface work begins, conditions on the demolition permit require that an archaeologist be on the site to monitor the work. But the work so far has been just taking down steel frames and stripping walls. So far, nothing of interest has been encountered, says Rebugio.

Only limited digging is contemplated, mostly around foundations and building pads.

Pioneer Mill was unusual in Hawaii for using a diffusion process to recover cane juice. This was slightly more efficient – about 1 percent – than conventional methods, but the gain did not justify the cost, and other plantations did not adopt diffusion.

Besides the stack, one remnant of the century-old operation will remain in place for the foreseeable future. The hydroseparator, a large tank dug partly into the ground, will be taken out but the hole will become a retention basin to handle rainwater.

Eventually, very little sign of more than a century of cane processing will be available, except from old documents given by Pioneer Mill to Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii; and photographs and other records of the mill being provided under terms of the demolition permit to be filed with the county.