As Questions Mount, Navy Turns Back on Red Hill Community Representation Initiative, Hawaiʻi Residents
By Wayne Tanaka, Chapter Director | Reading time: 4 minutes
After years ofwalking back its original commitments to meet regularly with the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative (CRI), the Navy has finally decided—with the backing of the US Environmental Protection Agency—that it no longer needs to meet with the CRI whatsoever.
This was an extremely disappointing development, even for those who have watched Navy representatives repeatedly evade the questions and concerns raised during the few meetings they did attend. In an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, CRI Chair Susan Gorman Chang noted that the last meeting the Navy participated in had seemed promising, especially after the EPA finally brought in a trauma-informed facilitator to support the process.
“I thought we were moving in the right direction,” Chang was quoted as saying.
Former CRI Chair Marti Townsend also questioned the Navy’s claim that the CRI was “not meeting expectations,” pointing out that the Navy’s refusal to engage, and its failure to acknowledge or address festering trust issues, are precisely why those expectations were not met.
Notably, the Navy’s decision comes at a time when new developments related to the Red Hill catastrophe are raising even more questions, adding to the more than 200 community concerns the CRI has already compiled from the community, many of which remain unanswered. These include:
Documented claims of Navy decisionmakersrefusing the EPA’s request to preserve now-spoiled water samples from the November 2021 fuel spill, samples that could have provided critical evidence about what 93,000 Oʻahu residents were exposed to. While a court latersided with the Navy by saying that these samples are still in a lab, their condition now makes them all but useless for testing.
Confirmation from the EPA that the Navy’s water system still lacks a required Risk Resilience Assessment and basic standard operating procedures years after the contamination catastrophe.
Evidence that the Navy continues to rely on drinking water storage tanks that have not been fully inspected or cleaned in over a decade, and will not be cleaned until 2030, even after being contaminated by jet fuel and other compounds in 2021. Sediment or sludge buildup in these tanks raised concernsabout potential pathogens and toxic chemicals that may not be detected in water quality testing but that could be released into the Navy’s drinking water system should tank water levels change (such as during a fire or due to equipment malfunctions).
Ongoing uncertainty about whether components of a proposedexperimental water filtration system to reopen the Navy’s ʻAiea Hālawa drinking water shaft meet NSF/ANSI 61 national health effects standards for materials and devices that come into contact with drinking water.
Numerous still-unexplainedirregularities with Navy water testing from before and after the November 2021 catastrophe, with no assurances to protect against future potential manipulation of water samples or test results.
Agreement from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that contamination exposure may have occurred even before November 2021 (as also conceded by the Hawaiʻi Department of Health in its2023 assessment), despite the refusal of the EPA or Navy to acknowledge this possibility.
The continued absence of a complete groundwater flow model or a contaminant fate and transport model originally required in the 2015 Red Hill Administrative Order on Consent, alongside the detection of PFAS in Hālawa shaft andas far west as the Board of Water Supply Kaʻamilo well serving neighborhoods in ʻAiea.
The ongoing lack of investment in technology and strategies that can actively remediate PFAS, jet fuel, and other contaminants releasedinto our aquifer from the Red Hill facility (current soil vapor extraction efforts merely remove volatile components of jet fuel from above the water table, and does nothing to address PFAS or jet fuel that is in the aquifer itself; ongoingstudies on jet fuel biodegradation are also still in their pre-print stages and are not focused on whether and how compounds from degraded jet fuel is safer – or more dangerous – to human health).
These are just some of the more recent situations that have only raised additional significant issues on top of the CRI’shundreds of unanswered questions to the Navy and EPA, gathered over thousands of volunteer hours invested in building community trust and compiling community concerns, as the CRI was intended to do.
Whether the Navy’s decision to disengage is an attempt to avoid answering these questions remains unclear. What is clear is that the community’s ability to get transparency and answers has now been relegated to one-on-one presentations and a biannual Fuel Tank Advisory Committee meeting, both controlled almost entirely by the Navy.
As a result, public participation in these spaces, as well as at the Legislature and before other government entities such as the Red Hill Water Alliance Initiative (which holds no public meetings), has now become even more critical to securing true accountability from those entities most responsible for our ongoing, generations-long water crisis.
Upcoming Events
The first of two Fuel Tank Advisory Committee meetings for 2026 will be held on Thursday, April 9 at 9am at the Department of Health Environmental Health Administration baseyard at 2827 Waimano Home Road, #100, Pearl City, HI 96782 and virtually via Microsoft Teams here.
The Red Hill CRI will hold its next meeting on April 16 at 5pm via Zoom. Register here.
A Red Hill Walk For Wai – a community response to the Navy and EPA’s decision to turn their backs on the CRI – save the date for June 20 at Ala Moana Beach Park. Follow @justice4aina on Instagram for updates.