Need-to-know Red Hill updates and insights from March
By Madison Owens, Rosalie Luo, Organizers, and Wayne Tanaka, Chapter Director | Reading time: 18 minutes
ACTION ALERT!
HB2690 HD2 SD1, which would politically insulate the critical work of the Hawaiʻi Commission on Water Resource Management as well as establish a “Red Hill WAI Policy Coordinator” under the Commission, must be heard by the Senate Judiciary and Ways and Means Committee this week. Please take a moment to help save this bill, details and sample message here, and protect our precious wai from any further undue political or military influence.
FTAC Meeting (March 7, 2024)
Last month’s biannual Fuel Tank Advisory Commission (FTAC) meeting, held on March 7, 2024, provided some deeply unsettling - if not outright frustrating - updates on matters of longstanding concern regarding human and environmental health.
Agenda items included updates on the defueling and closure processes, the transition of leadership from the Joint Task Force - Red Hill to the Navy Closure Task Force - Red Hill, the SWARM team water test analyses, and activities by the Department of Health and EPA. You can watch the five-hour long meeting here and review presentation materials here; notable highlights from the discussion are provided below.
Tank Venting and Cleaning
The Navy Closure Task Force - Red Hill (NCTF-RH), tasked with the post-defueling decommissioning of the Red Hill Fuel Facility, provided a summary of their tank cleaning process, which will involve the venting of fumes; installation of tank cleaning infrastructure; the removal, containment, transport, and disposal of approximately 30,000 gallons of highly toxic solid sludge; pressure washing of the tanks (using “Simple Green”); and the removal of cleaning infrastructure. Pipelines containing about 4,000 gallons of residual fuel will also be removed. If all goes well, this process will take approximately three years to complete.
Of particular concern is the potential for vented, heavier-than-air fuel vapors from the 250 million gallon capacity tanks to sink and move like an invisible, toxic wave across the landscape. The Department of Health has accordingly mandated the Navy to conduct air quality monitoring as part of its tank venting process - although specifics regarding any pre-venting and real-time alert strategies were not fully developed.
Use of Simple Green
The use of Simple Green to washdown the tanks as part of the facility decommissioning process has raised concerns regarding the potential for (even more of) this degreaser to be released into the environment. Such a release could mobilize the 200,000 - 2,000,000 gallons of fuel that have been released by the Red Hill Facility over the decades, pushing this historical contamination into our aquifer and spreading the toxic plume in our groundwater to other wells and springs.
Ironically, the Navy defended its planned use of “Simple Green” in power washing the Red Hill fuel tank’s inner walls as “critical,” asking the audience to imagine taking a “shower without soap - how clean would you really get?”
This statement seemed incongruent with the Navy’s ongoing position that water tanks, pipes, and water heaters on its water system would have been completely “cleaned” of jet fuel, when they were flushed only with fresh water, and no “soap” of any kind.
Water Testing Results Inconclusive
In a relatively technical presentation, Chris Waldron, a Navy-contracted environmental engineer, later expounded on the “SWARM” team’s hypothesis that detections of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) in the Navy’s water system may have been “false positives,” due to the lab testing method used to analyze over 8,000 Navy water samples.
Waldron emphasized that the testing method, EPA Method 8015, was not designed for assessing drinking water safety, nor was it intended to detect TPH contamination at such low levels.
FTAC community representatives as well as Board of Water Supply chief engineer Ernie Lau expressed deep disappointment that the Navy’s chosen method - used presently and previously for the over 8,000 samples taken following the November 2021 leak - could in fact have obscured low-level positive detections throughout this entire time. Moreover, it appears that there are no more water samples available from the months immediately following the 2021 spill, to identify the range of compounds that may have been introduced into the Navy’s water system.
To support the SWARM team’s hypothesis, Waldron also emphasized that chromatogram profiles, or “fingerprints,” of water samples did not match the chromatogram profiles of JP-5 or other fuel-derived compounds, such as benzene. However, he did not specify or discuss the potential for the creation of other chemicals - with different chromatogram profiles - that could be formed by the combination, degradation, and/or bacterial consumption of jet fuel, degraded jet fuel constituents, chlorine, fluoride, Simple Green, deicing agent, soil, or other environmental contaminants, or how these could have also impacted their TPH testing method.
Neither Waldron nor any other Navy or EPA representatives offered any concrete specifics on alternative or additional planned approaches to the use of Method 8015, although they alluded to other more “forensic” strategies that may be employed in the future, such as mass spectrometry.
Ongoing Water Waste Issues
The Navy once again reconfirmed its continued dumping of 4,000,000 gallons of freshwater from the Red Hill shaft every day into Hālawa stream – an egregious waste of water that still has not been mitigated despite years of urging by the Department of Health and Water Commission. While recognizing that the pump-and-dump process is intended to create a “capture zone” preventing the contamination plume under Kapūkakī from spreading throughout the aquifer, Water Commission representative Ryan Ozawa reiterated the Commission’s position that the Navy find a way to put the pumped water to beneficial reuse.
Click here to find more information on past Red Hill FTAC meetings or here to watch the March 7, 2024 FTAC meeting.
Navy Premise Plumbing Assessment Raises More Questions Than Answers (March 13, 2024)
On March 13 - a few days after the FTAC meeting where details could have been more meaningfully discussed during Chris Waldron’s SWARM team presentation - the Navy released its “Preliminary Premise Plumbing Assessment and Water Heater Sampling Summary” report (originally dated February 24, 2024), conducted in response to the health and water contamination issues finally recognized by the EPA at the end of 2023.
This report summarized test results from water samples taken from the Waiawa shaft, residences (including hot water heaters), and fire hydrants. Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) were found in numerous samples from all sample sources, ranging from 50 parts per billion (ppb) to over 140 ppb.
Despite these detections, the report did not identify or verify the source of contamination or the causes of the continued health complaints. As presented by Chris Waldron in the FTAC meeting, chromatogram analyses - looking at the chemical “fingerprint” of compounds in water samples - also indicated that the compounds in the samples did not match the chromatogram profiles of JP-5 or diesel, beyond “small peaks” that were dismissed as “laboratory artifacts.”
The “preliminary” report therefore recommended that future chromatogram analyses be expanded to include additional compounds (with no specific suggestions of what these compounds should be), the potential for laboratory contamination to be explored (more below), the use of alternative lab and sampling methods, the convening of a working group with more subject matter experts, the investigation of other water quality concerns including odors and sheens, and further research into the Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam water system infrastructure, as well as the exploration of additional “root cause analyses” to determine the source of TPH detections and spikes. No further specifics were provided, and no recommendations for precautionary measures to protect civilian or military water consumers were made.
Without any real answers this long-awaited report accordingly raises more questions than answers. Why were chromatogram profiles for only JP-5 and diesel constituents used, when there is likely to be a range of compounds with varying profiles that could result from chemical reactions between jet fuel and chlorine, fluoride, Simple Green, deicing agent, PFAS, water, biological materials including bacteria, and other environmental contaminants (including “APPL jelly”)? What about the 200,000 to two million gallons of JP-5, JP-8, marine diesel, and other potential compounds that were released over the past 80 years, that may have reacted with the environment and been mobilized by the November 2021 spill? Could these additives and compounds impacted sampling and testing methods, such as the efficacy of solvents used to isolate TPH? Why are new lab testing methods only now being recommended (and what are they?), after two years of testing failed to account for ongoing complaints regarding sheens and illnesses associated with Navy water (a concern that has been raised throughout this entire time)? What about the many TPH detections above the 100 ppb concentration?
Most importantly - in the face of such ongoing uncertainty, why aren’t the families, including children, infants, and pets on the Navy’s water lines, be given direct warnings regarding the ongoing prevalence of health issues, so that they can evaluate their own tolerance of risk?
It remains to be seen if a “final” report to this “preliminary assessment” does include more specifics, including more concrete commitments, in a more timely manner.
CRI Rejects Navy Attempt to Strongarm Process
Just days before its March meeting, the Community Representation Initiative (CRI) firmly rejected an unexplained and unexpected email demand from a Pentagon Navy official, whose prior history involving the threat of gun violence against minors prompted calls to have him prohibited from interacting with the group, including from a CRI member who lost a child due to gun violence.
Ironically, a concurrent press release from the Pentagon - which caught even the EPA by surprise - complained about Navy officials feeling “unsafe” and “disrespected,” and then attempted to dictate the topics of conversation at the March CRI meeting.
In response, the CRI issued a public statement calling out the Navy’s attempt to control the CRI’s agenda and evade inconvenient topics of conversation, reaffirming their commitment to uplifting community questions and concerns as called for under the 2023 Administrative Consent Order. To read the CRI’s response, please click here.
CRI Meeting #6 (March 18, 2024)
The next CRI meeting will be on April 18th, location to be determined. Please visit the CRI website for more information.
As usual, the CRI meeting on March 21 finally provided a much more meaningful opportunity to discuss the real issues of concern with the Hawaiʻi community, including those suffering from health issues.
This included extended and repeated demands by multiple CRI members, including Dr. Walter Chun, M.D., affected service member Maj. Amanda Feindt, Native Hawaiian community representative Healani Sonoda-Pale, and community representative ʻIlima DeCosta, regarding why a water advisory and alternative water were not being issued for those living on the Navy’s water lines. CRI members wasted no time cutting through the “numbers” and chemistry-laden technical discussion regarding sampling and faulty testing methods; as Dr. Chun described:
CRI members also pointed to Navy medical procedures stating that water contamination from an unknown source should result in a “do not use” notice for consumption, firefighting, and sanitation.
To her credit, the Hawaiʻi Department of Health’s Deputy Director for Environmental Health Kathy Ho did urge the Navy to provide alternative water sources for families who felt unsafe drinking Navy water, regardless of whether they were already suffering from health impacts. However, EPA and Department of Health representatives demurred over any commitment to issue a water advisory that would prevent illnesses and, as one CRI member warned, legal and moral liabilities for harms arising from their inaction.
CRI members did raise the issue of PFAS, which had been found in samples from the Navy’s Red Hill shaft and which was reported in the Navy’s water system prior to the November 2021 fuel spill. However, Navy representatives refused to discuss PFAS, repeatedly using the excuse that PFAS was not part of the 2023 Administrative Consent Order (ACO) (which, notably, did not include PFAS due to the fact that these forever chemicals were supposedly addressed in the 2015 Administrative Order on Consent). After witnessing Navy officials continue to dodge any questions relating to “forever chemicals” released from the Red Hill Facility, Sierra Club representative David Henkin did comment:
On other matters, CRI members did follow up on the Navy’s prior commitment to share a notification “package” provided to incoming residents on the Navy’s water lines regarding this history of contamination and ongoing health issues, finding the information provided lacking (which Admiral Barnett promised to revisit).
They were able to obtain further details, although not a complete plan, for the planned venting alert system discussed at the previous FTAC meeting.
Affected family representative Lacey Quintero also did an excellent job rebutting the Navy’s misleading description of the contamination plume in Oʻahu’s aquifer as “reducing,” when heat maps from a handful of monitoring wells around Kapūkakī at best indicate only that the plume has migrated away from their water sample intakes.
Oʻahu resident Susan Gorman-Chang also made sure to reaffirm eight commitments made by the Navy for the next CRI meeting, including: a follow up on the Navy medical guidance calling for “do not use advisories” in the event of water contamination from an unknown contaminant; attendance by a SWARM team representative; a final premise plumbing report to be reviewed or “coordinated” with the Department of Health and EPA prior to its release; a briefing on the air quality monitoring plan for tank venting, including whether real-time air monitor apps and in-home air monitors would be used; a response regarding the CRI’s request for a tour of the Red Hill Facility; and a SWARM team final report reviewed by the Department of Health and EPA.
As in past meetings, the CRI also provided a forum for families still suffering from health impacts and contamination issues to voice their concerns directly to Navy leadership. This included heartbreaking testimonies from a mom whose child now has permanent colon damage; another whose daughter still suffers from agonizing stomach pain and an inability to swallow; a woman who related the psychological traumas still being felt in the community, including her own - which she described as worse than what she experienced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and another affected individual who is now going blind in one eye due to neurologic issues – reminiscent of those raised by another impacted Navy resident, Katherine McClanahan, who had revealed her own progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disease at the FTAC meeting.
Testifiers also provided concerning anecdotes regarding individuals tasked with implementing water testing for households with ongoing water complaints, including stories of a Navy liaison who claimed to be the “only person” working on providing test results to affected households, and of a liaison who was spreading traumatizing “disinformation” during water testing house calls.
In response to these testimonies, Admiral Barnett did commit to sending a team to investigate the clear evidence of contamination issue at one testifier’s home, to ensure that the property managers for the civilian Kapilina Beach Homes community, served by the Navy’s water lines, were informing their tenants of the history of health and contamination issues, and to look into trauma-informed training for water testing teams and liaison(s).
For now, whether and how the Navy will follow through on its commitments - elicited only through the tireless diligence of the Red Hill CRI - will remain to be seen. For updates on these and other matters, be sure to mark your calendars for the next CRI on April 18, with meeting details to be forthcoming.
EPA Drinking Water Report Documents Sheens, Health Issues (March 21, 2024)
EPA Region 9 released their Investigation Report #2 in response to drinking water complaints on March 21, three months after their first report in December of 2023. The investigation occurred from February 14-16 this year by EPA inspectors Christopher Chen and Claire Ong.
The EPA received 28 complaints in February and inspectors interviewed eight residents in-person and five over the phone. Of these 13 residents, eight were served by Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam’s (JBPHH) water system owned by the Navy, and five were served by the Aliamanu Military Reservation (AMR) water system owned by the Army. Both water systems were contaminated in November 2021, and both currently rely on water from Waiawa Shaft.
Residents’ complaints included observing sheens in their water (6 residents) and various physical symptoms including skin irritation (all 13 residents), gastrointestinal issues (5 residents), hair loss (6 residents), nausea, fatigue, migraines, and other ailments. Several residents (3) also indicated that they encountered an unprofessional Navy representative over the phone during the complaint process, and five indicated their dissatisfaction with the type or amount of alternative water provided. Of the seven homes with their samples reported on the Safe Waters website, one had a TPH detection above 50 ppb and others were considered “non-detect.”
Most notably, almost all of the residents indicated their lack of trust in the Navy after the initial response to the 2021 spill. Several indicated that they were no longer regularly reporting their concerns due to fear of reprisal or lack of confidence in their response. Those who went to the Red Hill Clinic also described negative experiences. The EPA inspectors recommend that the Navy 1) add the capability to collect immediate water sheen samples when visiting homes, 2) develop an outreach plan to communicate any protections for individuals against retaliation when filing complaints, and 3) develop a standard operation procedure for managing alternative water resources.
BWS meeting (March 25, 2024)
Red Hill was on the agenda once again at the monthly BWS Board of Directors meeting on March 25th. Civil engineer Joyce Lin gave an update to the board and several testifiers from the public provided comments..
After the Navy refused to discuss PFAS during the CRI meeting, the BWS forum provided an opportunity to dive deeper into the issue. Ernie Lau, chief engineer and manager, brought up many key points that resonated with the public, including the importance of understanding the full life history of the facility in relation to the evidence of PFAS and other contamination sources in the area, such as the Army National Guard training sites in Pearl City Industrial Park. As Ernie argued, PFAS is the canary in the coal mine, and more information is needed to comprehend the legacy of the facility’s effect on the environment and our precious wai. Accordingly, he emphasized the importance of having PFAS addressed immediately, through the 2015 Administrative Order on Consent (AOC), rather than having PFAS and jet fuel releases from the Red Hill Facility investigated separately. Interestingly, the EPA had previously indicated that PFAS were in fact being addressed through the 2015 AOC, in its decision not to include PFAS in its 2023 Administrative Consent Order.
Water Protectors Appreciation Picnic (March 23, 2024)
On the weekend of World Water Day, water protectors from across Oʻahu came together for a special appreciation picnic, marking a significant milestone in their efforts: the passage of a Resolution Urging the Safe and Immediate Defueling and Permanent Decommissioning of the Entire Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Fuel Facility at Kapūkakī by every neighborhood board on Oʻahu. Over 30 individuals joined in, including esteemed community leader, Ernie Lau, Chief Engineer of the Board of Water Supply, alongside dedicated neighborhood board members such as Tiana Wilbus (Chair of the Waiʻanae Coast neighborhood board), James Kawika Gauer (Vice chair of Aliamanu-Salt Lake-Foster Village Neighborhood Board), Kim Coco Iwamoto (Ala Moana-Kakaʻako Neighborhood Board Treasurer) and Dyson Chee (vice chair of Ala Moana-Kaka’ako Neighborhood Board).
Mahalo nui to all the water protectors who helped make this first-ever island-wide-supported resolution in the history of the neighborhood boards happen!
Upcoming Events:
Mark your calendars for these upcoming opportunities and events! Make sure to spread the word to your families, friends and networks!
April 5: Climate Action Workshop, 2-3:30pm at Dean Hall Access Lounge UHM
Co-sponsored by the William S. Richardson School of Law, Department of Sociology and the Environmental Justice Club at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, attend this unique workshop to learn how you can help promote the fundamental right to a life sustaining climate. Speakers include Michael Wilson, retired Hawai’i State Supreme Court Justice, and Saphira Goode, president of Richardson School of Law’s Environmental Law Society. This event is open to the public.
April 6: Ola i ka wai student event, 8:30am-12:30pm at Waikiki-Kapahulu Public library
In recognition of 2024 UNESCO World Water day and Earth Day, celebrate the importance of clean water and learn what we can do to protect it. Honolulu Board of Water Supply, Sierra Club, Hawai’i Youth Climate Coalition, hydroponics exhibits, student displays and more will be there to educate and inform attendees. There will be hands-on activities, like water quality testing and creating “Genki balls” as part of the Genki Ala Wai project. There will also be crafts and celebrations with plastics, body movement, a clean water pledge and more! To learn more and or sign up for the event click here.
April 16: Commission on Water Resources Management, 9am at DLNR Board Room (Hybrid)
April 18: Mark your calendar for the next “official” CRI meeting, one of the only venues for grassroots community representatives to raise questions and concerns regarding the Red Hill crisis. Location to be determined.
April 20: Bishop Museum’s annual Science and Sustainability Festival from 9am- 3pm on the Great Lawn
This one day event will feature keiki activities, workshops, exhibition highlights, special presentations, and interactive performances with scientists, cultural practitioners, and many community organizations such as Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i, as well as the Board of water supply