The State of Hawaii Department of Transportation, Highways Division, Oahu District (HDOT) was honored to receive multiple awards of recognition for its efforts in storm water management.

2016 Environmental Hero Award
HDOT was recognized by the City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Facility Maintenance, Storm Water Quality Branch for their exceptional service in water pollution prevention throughout 2016. Each year, the City hosts its Good Neighbor and Environmental Hero Awards, which recognizes organizations and volunteers who have made significant contributions to the Storm Water Quality programs in public education, outreach programs or executed best management practices.

2016 Gold Pele Award
HDOT won top honors at the 2016 Pele Awards, an annual design and advertising competition that recognizes the best advertising and design work in Hawaii.
HDOT’s keiki activity book, Hawaii Storm Patrol: New Recruits, and its companion website were created to educate Hawaii’s youth on the importance of preventing trash from entering Oahu’s storm drains and nearshore waters. These educational resources won Gold Peles in the following categories:
- Public Service Collateral
- Digital/Interactive – Branded Content
- Digital/Interactive – Public Service

2015 Koa Hammer Award of Excellence
The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Hawaii Chapter annually recognizes the state’s top communications professionals, campaigns and tactics at their Koa Anvil Awards Ceremony. Established in 1983, the Koa Anvil Awards captures and celebrates the four rings of excellence for which the Koa Anvil competition is judged: research, planning, execution and evaluation. It is a competition to develop better plans, use creativity to produce better results, increase professional skill to produce the best public relations programs and tools that keep the professional motivated and moving forward.
In 2015, HDOT received the 2015 Koa Hammer Award of Excellence for its redesigned Storm Water Hawaii website. The successfully redesigned website incorporated responsive web design, improved existing architecture, facilitated site maintenance and enhanced content. Since the redesign, HDOT has observed increased engagement across many metrics, including number of visits, average pages viewed per visit, number of unique visitors, and bounce rate.