Same Old Playbook: Red Hill Hearing Reveals Continued Navy Obfuscation, Misdirection, and Gaslighting
By Wayne Tanaka, Chapter Director | Reading time: 5 minutes
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In an appalling but unsurprising revelation in early January, a court hearing revealed how the Navy has relied and continues to rely on a familiar strategy of hiding evidence, misdirection, and gaslighting to evade accountability for its poisoning of thousands of families in the 2021 Red Hill catastrophe.
Last year, plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits seeking relief for the harms arising from the Red Hill fuel spills won a historic ruling from the federal district court in Hawaiʻi, which found that the Navy was in fact negligent in, and liable for, the contamination of a water system serving 93,000 Navy water line consumers.
However, the court limited the amount of damages awarded to 17 “bellwether” plaintiffs, finding that there was not enough evidence of what kinds of chemicals they were exposed to, to definitively connect their health issues with Navy-contaminated water lines.
As the court noted, “the actual and specific amount of chemicals that were released into the water supply and that reached the individual homes is not capable of being reliably calculated and thus was not proven.”
However, in her quest to learn everything she could about the Navy’s actions leading up to and following the 2021 fuel spills, impacted community member Meredith Wilson discovered that the Navy in fact knew it had access to water samples that could have helped the bellwether plaintiffs prove their case - and failed to disclose this fact to plaintiffs attorneys, while also ignoring the Environmental Protection Agency’s request to preserve the samples for future analysis. Accordingly, plaintiffs were not provided an opportunity to observe, much less participate in the collection of samples; use their own independent experts and water labs to identify what toxins they were exposed to; or build their case connecting their health symptoms to the Navy’s contamination of their water lines.
The Navy’s actions in refusing to notify those it had injured about evidence they needed both legally, and to advise their healthcare providers, was immediately challenged by Wilson’s attorneys, who are representing her in a separate lawsuit from the bellwether case. As they argued in January, the Navy’s failure to disclose the existence of the water samples, and its subsequent actions rendering them unusable, should result in an “inference” that their clients’ health problems were attributable to the Red Hill catastrophe - an appropriate remedy, for the Navy having knowingly hid the ball so critically needed by those it harmed.
As appalling as the Navy’s actions were, however, their larger response in the overall court case has been even more outrageous. In a series of revelations, the January hearing also demonstrated that the Navy has only continued its pattern of hiding information, misdirection, and outright gaslighting, to deprive those it has harmed from healing or justice.
For example, the Navy apparently provided plaintiffs with 12 million pages of “evidence,” much of which was printed from a database that plaintiffs were not allowed to access. As a result, plaintiffs and their small team of attorneys had to physically review this “evidence” page by page, rather than use a searchable database, to find clues of the Navy’s malfeasance.
Notably, Navy officials had previously employed a similar strategy, to overwhelm the Board of Water Supply with largely useless information as it sought to shut down the Red Hill facility. Texts reported by Civil Beat demonstrated their express intent to “inundate the [BWS] with info already publicly available or provided to DOH.”
Moreover, in the end, none of the voluminous documents originally provided by the Navy disclosed the fact that the samples of contaminated water existed - with only a reference to the AFFF pipeline the samples came from, indicating the pipe had been drained. When Wilson eventually discovered that these samples had in fact existed, it then took the Navy over seven months to provide her attorneys with additional relevant and highly critical documents that it had not included in the millions of pages of evidence initially provided.
This was not the Navy’s only attempt to misdirect attention away from inconvenient truths, even in this case alone. During the hearing itself, the Navy’s attorney argued that its contracted lab did still have some water samples in storage, suggesting that the plaintiffs could still have used these samples when their existence was discovered. However, the Navy’s own officials and experts had already recognized these samples as useless, given a history of cross-contamination due to improper handling, improper storage, too much headspace (allowing volatile toxins to dissipate), no chemical preservatives (to prevent toxins from degrading), and the length of time that has passed, among other factors.
The Navy and its attorneys apparently also could not refrain from gaslighting the plaintiffs, even during the hearing itself. In one instance, the Navy’s attorney suggested that the plaintiffs acted unfairly by not allowing the Navy to take plaintiffs’ blood samples, as the plaintiffs had done to detect evidence of the toxins they had been exposed to. As the plaintiffs’ attorney quickly pointed out, however, the taking of blood samples does not render a person’s blood unusable as evidence - unlike the Navy’s inappropriate collection and disposal of the water samples at issue. In another instance, the Navy’s attorney accused the plaintiffs of using the hidden evidence as a “chit” to buy time – despite the fact that the Navy itself took the better part of a year to provide critical additional evidence regarding the missing water samples, after having inundated them with millions upon millions of pages of less than helpful documents.
Whether the judge will grant the plaintiffs’ request is still uncertain, particularly on issues relating to the plaintiffs’ burden of proof. However, what does remain clear is that the Navy has not changed its ways even after years of dismissals, misdirection, and gaslighting only led to the contamination of Oʻahu’s aquifer, and the poisoning of thousands of families, military and civilian alike.