Press Release: Whistleblower Confirms Navy Misled Public on Red Hill fuel leak in 2020
For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Marti Townsend, 808-372-1314
Whistleblower Confirms Navy Misled Public on Red Hill fuel leak in 2020
Sierra Club calls for the immediate closure of the Red Hill Fuel Facility
HONOLULU, Hawaiʻi -- October 8, 2021 -- The Sierra Club expressed its outrage today over a Civil Beat article that revealed that Navy officials covered up a significant oil leak in the days before and during the contested case hearing on the Red Hill bulk fuel storage facility.
According to Sierra Club Director Marti Townsend, “The Navy covered up its active leak because it knew the significant leak would affect whether its permit got approved. The Navy’s internal emails demonstrate that it cannot be trusted. And remember this is not the first time the Navy has misled the public about post-2014 leaks from Red Hill.”
A May 7, 2021 Navy news release claimed that a May 6, 2021 release was “properly collected”; “the system worked as designed”; and that the fuel was “contained within our facility.” Yet soil vapor monitoring data released by Health Department showed the fuel had gotten into the ground where it cannot be cleaned up. Evidence presented at the contested case hearing over the Navy’s permit showed that two weeks before the leak, soil vapor monitor readings below tank 20 ranged between 173 and 223 parts per billion by volume in the area of the leak. A few days after the leak, indications of fuel in the ground spiked more than one thousand times to 232,667.
At the contested case hearing, a witness for the U.S. Navy stated on the record that there had been no leaks from the Red Hill facility since 1988, other than the leak that was reported to the Health Department in 2014.
Townsend also stated: “The Red Hill fuel tanks need to be immediately shut down because they are too old to operate safely and the Navy is not trustworthy enough to put something so important as our drinking water supply at risk. Continuing to operate these fuel tanks is a crime against the people of Oʻahu.”
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