It’s been more than two months since 233,000 gallons of molasses leaked into Honolulu Harbor, killing thousands of fish and coral in those waters and Keehi Lagoon.
However, neither the company responsible for the disaster nor the state agency assessing the damage has released a reportto shed more light on the causes and scope of the spill.
It’s not clear when those reports, from shipping company Matson Inc. and the Department of Land and Natural Resources, will be made public.
In the days after the spill, which was reported Sept. 9, Matson executives, faced with myriad questions about the incident, said the company planned to release its findings on what led to the disaster — but they weren’t sure when the report would be ready.
"We’re still in the process of investigating," Matson spokesman Jeff Hull said Tuesday. He said he wasn’t sure when Matson’s report would be completed.
The company has been cooperating with local and federal investigators, including the U.S. Department of Justice, Hull said. A federal grand jury subpoenaed Matson in October for documents linked to the spill. On Tuesday, Hull said he couldn’t comment on the subpoenas, including whether they had affected the company’s release of its report.
Meanwhile, DLNR, which is assessing the spill’s damage to coral, fish and other marine life, did not respond to several requests this week for an update on its investigation. What it concludes could help determine the spill’s full remediation costs.
The molasses was found to have leaked into the harbor through a fist-size hole in a corroded steel pipe below Pier 52. Matson has suspended its molasses export operation since the spill. The company previously sent as much as 2,000 tons of the thick, syrupy liquid out of the state each week. It would first arrive by barge in Honolulu from Maui.
On Monday, Hull said Matson is still weighing whether it’s worth restarting molasses shipments.
With that operation on hold, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar, which produces the molasses on Maui, shipped 11,000 tons of the substance to Asia for livestock feed earlier this month, company officials said.
HC&S has enough capacity to store molasses through the rest of the current harvest season, which ends at the end of the calendar year, according to HC&S General Manager Rick Volner.
"We continue to evaluate various options for 2014 to ship molasses from Maui," Volner said in a statement Tuesday.
Officials have described the molasses spill as one of the worst environmental disasters seen in Hawaii. Matson officials said shortly after the spill that the company did not have a response plan for a molasses spill, and state officials said their agencies did not require Matson to have such a plan.
Then, 10 days after the spill, state Department of Transportation officials revealed that their workers twice saw molasses leaking from the same faulty, Matson-owned pipe.