Pentagon releases 2-year plan to drain Red Hill fuel tanks

The Pentagon expects it will take at least two years to safely defuel the 20 massive tanks at its underground Red Hill fuel storage facility, according to a five-phase plan released Thursday by the state Department of Health.

The plan was released along with the Pacific Fleet’s official investigation into the contamination of the Navy’s water system, which serves 93,000 people on Oahu, by fuel from the facility in November.

The document outlining the plan said that after consulting experts, the Department of Defense identified Dec. 31, 2024, “as the earliest date that is consistent with the safe defueling of the facility, based on the information that DoD has at this time.”

As part of the plan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued orders for the creation of Joint Task Force Red Hill, which will be led by a Navy admiral, yet to be chosen, whose sole responsibility will be to ensure the “safe and expeditious” defueling of Red Hill.

The Red Hill tanks were built underground during World War II to make them harder for enemy forces to attack. The 80-year-old facility’s aging tanks sit just 100 feet above a critical aquifer that provides the majority of Honolulu’s drinking water.

The Navy has declined to say how much fuel the facility, which can hold up to 250 million gallons, actually has, but the released plan mentioned the figure 104 million gallons.

Phase 1 of the plan was compiled from an assessment, which the Department of Defense considers to be completed after contractor Simpson Gumpertz &Heger Inc. documented a litany of infrastructure problems and needed repairs to make the facility safe to defuel. The assessment, in particular, noted the pipe system that brings fuel from the tanks to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam is in dire condition and prone to spills and leaks.

Phase 2 anticipates planning to wrap up in August. The Navy is still waiting for a report on pipeline and fire system safety as well as a review by the Environmental Protection Agency. “At the completion of both of these efforts, we expect to receive additional recommendations for critical infrastructure repairs or safety measures,” the plan said.

Phase 2 includes laying out contingency plans for any spills or leaks that might occur during the defueling process.

Phase 3 involves hiring contractors and making repairs to the pipelines, tanks and other facilities. This is expected to take 17 months.

The final preparations, Phase 4, are expected to take three months.

Phase 5, the actual defueling and relocation of the fuel, is expected to take four to eight months and will be overseen largely by the Defense Logistics Agency.

“While defueling is not achievable within 30 days, as originally requested by DOH, DoD commits to de­fueling at the earliest date consistent with safety and protection of public health and the environment and believes that this plan, based on the best available information and subject to contingencies, lays out a path to meet that standard,” the document said.

However, the Pentagon is being cautious about the timeline, warning that the December 2024 completion date “is subject to contingencies, but DoD will work to mitigate any delays caused by contingencies and will inform DOH and the public about any major contingencies that arise during plan implementation that may affect timelines.”

Phase 3, in particular, has the potential to drag on longer. Before the facility is able to defuel, the plan asserts that the Navy must remove fuel currently sitting in its pipeline system, a process referred to in the report as “unpacking.” The document asserts that “some of the infrastructure repairs … cannot commence until those lines are unpacked.”

The Navy intends to go about that process by reactivating parts of the fuel system, which the report notes will require a “limited waiver” from the DOH.

The military plan asserts that unpacking the pipes “will require some limited operation of some parts of the distribution system, but it will not require any operations involving the storage tanks. … DoD believes that it can safely unpack the lines in advance of completing any of SGH’s recommended infrastructure repairs.”

The document also warns of potential delays due to supply chain disruptions.

One major challenge will be the unique design of Red Hill. The 80-year-old facility is one of a kind, with several parts of the pipeline built specifically for it, making it much harder to find parts and materials.

“These types of repairs require materials with long lead procurements, as the materials and components are non-standard dimension piping uniquely manufactured for Red Hill and thus must be custom fabricated off-island,” the plan said. “Navy reports experiencing delays of up to 30 weeks for on-island orders on similar materials and recognizes the supply chain dependency and potential risk to meeting plan timelines.”

The document said Austin is exploring invoking the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law that allows the president to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for materials and projects deemed necessary for national defense, regardless of whether it could cause the business to incur financial losses.

The plan said the commander of Joint Task Force Red Hill will be “taking this type of early action to address long lead times” and that “the Navy has been performing market research to understand and plan strategies to mitigate any potential supply chain delays.”

A major question has been where the fuel itself will go during the defueling process. The plan notes that “includes using all available capacity and on-island storage at a Contractor Owned/Contractor Operated (COCO) facility” and the possibility of putting the fuel on a series of tanker ships.

The document said the Defense Logistics Agency estimates it will have available capacity by 2023.

The contractor-owned facility in question will most likely be Par Hawaii’s at Campbell Industrial Park in Kapolei. State officials and lawmakers have been in talks with Par executives about taking on fuel from Red Hill and have urged military officials to use the company’s properties on the Leeward side of the island.

The Defense Logistics Agency’s preferred course of action laid out in the plan is to use “a single, existing contracted tanker” with a 10 million-gallon capacity that would ferry fuel from a pier and haul it to the storage facility in a “12-day cycle time that includes pier arrival, loading fuel, transit time to the COCO facility, downloading fuel at the facility, and transiting back to the pier.”

The Red Hill facility stores three types of fuel, and the document warns that these fuels cannot be mixed, requiring separate trips and storage.

The logistics agency found little advantage to using multiple tankers to expedite the process, with the document asserting that adding an additional tanker “would only reduce the defueling timeframe by 14-28 days since resetting the pier is still required.”