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The Navy has yet to sign on to a roundtable convened by state and federal environmental regulators to share information and chart an action plan for remediating fuel contamination caused by the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As a result, work on the plan has been stalled for the past couple of months.
Gabriela Carvalho, the EPA’s Red Hill project coordinator, said the action plan is expected to be a collection of all the environmental work that is underway and that needs to be done to remediate contamination from Red Hill fuel releases and restore the polluted groundwater.
“The goal of the action plan is to communicate with key stakeholders and the public how remediation of Red Hill contamination will happen over the next several years,” she said during a Nov. 9 Fuel Tank Advisory Committee meeting.
“Progress on developing this action plan has been stalled over the last couple months because the Navy hasn’t been able to commit to participate,” said Carvalho. “We hope that the Navy will commit to participating. We have been in discussions with high-level Navy personnel about this, and we are hopeful that those discussions will continue.”
Rear Adm. Stephen Barnett, commander of Navy Region Hawaii, told the Honolulu Star- Advertiser during the meeting that defense officials in Washington, D.C., are still working out details about what level of participation there will be from the Navy.
“We will be participating; we are just trying to fine-tune the level of participation,” said Barnett.
During a follow-up interview last week, Carvalho said there was no update on the Navy’s participation.
The Navy has for months pledged transparency and collaboration, and the roundtable is intended to facilitate the sharing of information with key agencies that have a stake in water protection. In addition to the EPA and state Department of Health, which have regulatory authority over Red Hill, the committee includes the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, which supplies most of Oahu’s drinking water and is entrusted with protecting the resource, the Commission on Water Resource Management, which ensures that water is pumped from wells at sustainable levels that protect the aquifer, and the U.S. Geological Survey, which lends its scientific expertise.
The Pentagon announced in March that it would permanently shut down the Red Hill facility, which includes 20 underground fuel tanks and a system of pipelines that extend to Pearl Harbor. The decision was made amid a public backlash against the Navy after fuel from the facility leaked in 2021 and contaminated the Navy’s drinking water system, which serves about 93,000 customers in and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Closure of the facility triggers environmental requirements, including an investigation into historic fuel releases at the site and an analysis of what remediation is needed.
Navy documents and records that date back to the 1940s, when the facility was constructed, indicate that there may have been at least 76 fuel leaks from Red Hill over the decades totaling 180,000 gallons of fuel. However, records are spotty.
Some of the remediation efforts began in 2015, when the Navy signed on to an administrative order of consent with the EPA and DOH following a 27,000- gallon fuel leak from the facility. Other cleanup requirements are being driven by an interagency drinking water team formed to deal with the immediate emergency of 2021’s drinking water contamination and other state regulatory requirements, according to the EPA.
The roundtable “is really a way to sit down and meet with these key water protection and public trust agencies to share information and make sure that as work is underway, as it has been underway, to remediate contamination that these key stakeholders have an opportunity to provide input early and often throughout the process,” Carvalho told the Star-Advertiser.
Part of the remediation efforts include drilling monitoring wells to determine where fuel contamination may be migrating. While most of those wells are being overseen by the Navy, the Honolulu Board of Water Supply is also installing monitoring wells.
“The Navy has been very open in sharing with us recently the potential locations, and we are trying to collaborate on that so we are working together,” said Lau. “But I think that the regulators also need to be on board, and I think this roundtable needs to proceed as soon as possible.”
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