Oil freed by water-main repair enters Honolulu Harbor

A broken water main on busy Nimitz Highway continued to frustrate rush hour drivers Thursday night and is responsible for spewing an unknown amount of "gooey tarballs" into Hono­lulu Harbor.

The petroleum-based material that flowed into Hono­lulu Harbor after the water main broke at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday night had been floating above the underground water table since at least World War II — and perhaps for as long as a century, said Gary Gill, deputy director of the state Health Department’s Environmental Health Administration.

Gill had no exact figures on how much material flowed into the harbor, but said it was more likely "tens of gallons as opposed to thousands of gallons."

Health Department emergency responders who were alerted to the release of the tarballs Wednesday morning blocked some of them from flowing into storm drains, and placed oil booms around Pier 35.

But some of the material likely flowed into the open water of the harbor, Gill said.

"I would suspect some got into the harbor before we got the booms up," Gill said. "How much, I don’t know. … People should know the results of our oil dependancy for the past century. And this is what we have to do to address it."

The 16-inch water main that broke Tuesday night was originally installed in 1942.

Honolulu Board of Water Supply repair crews were unable to restore normal, Ewa-bound Nimitz Highway traffic during rush hour Thursday afternoon after they also damaged a synthetic natural gas line earlier in the day that belongs to The Gas Co. The work continued Thursday night. The gas line problem is unrelated to the release of the tarballs.

Crews first had to repair the gas line’s protective coating before they could refill the hole above the water main and repave the highway.

"The pipeline was never compromised," Gas Co. spokes­woman Stephanie Ackerman said. "There was no gas leak. Before we cover up the hole, we have to recoat the gas pipeline."

A Board of Water Supply spokes­man said Thursday he was unaware of the release of tarballs into Hono­lulu Harbor.

But Gill was not surprised that Board of Water Supply crews digging eight feet down to get to the broken water main exposed the oil-based material.

"Any excavation in that area has a high likelihood of running into this contaminated soil," he said. "The Hono­lulu Harbor/Iwilei district area is permeated by a large swatch of underground oil products, which is sitting on the water table. It’s the result of 100 years of oil pipelines leaking along that corridor that runs along Nimitz Highway."

Tuesday night’s water main break occurred "at ground zero of the underground pollution problem," Gill said.

Federal and state environmental officials have been working to clean up the area for decades, and Tuesday night’s release of petroleum-based material "is just the latest incarnation of this mess," Gill said. "It’s a reminder that it’s still there after we’ve been working all these years to address it."