‘Electrical smell’ diverts flight to Guam
An electrical smell in the cabin or cockpit forced a United Airlines flight from Honolulu to Guam to land on Midway Island on Thursday night, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The airline said Friday it flew the 335 passengers and 13 crew members from Flight 201 back to Honolulu. It put Guam-bound passengers on another flight.
The Boeing 777 was heading to Guam on Thursday when it was diverted. United says replacement aircraft brought passengers back to Honolulu on Friday morning.
The Navy used the atoll 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu as a base during the Cold War but left in 1996. It’s now a national wildlife refuge.
Tripler groundwater free of fuel, tests say
Tests conducted by independent contractors of a monitoring well at Tripler Army Medical Center indicates that diesel fuel did not leak into the groundwater, the Navy confirmed Friday night.
Different contractors were hired by the Navy and the Army to conduct the testing, which did not detect diesel fuel in the groundwater monitoring well, said Capt. Mike Williamson, commanding officer for Navy Facilities and Engineering Command Hawaii.
"It was important that both independently conducted tests showed the same results," Williamson said in a news release.
When a preliminary finding in May indicated high levels of diesel contamination, officials with both the state Health Department and Honolulu Board of Water Supply publicly voiced concerns about what may have cause the situation.
The news came on the heels of the Jan. 13 discovery that an underground storage tank at nearby Red Hill leaked up to 27,000 gallons of jet fuel. Navy, Health Department and BWS officials all deemed the groundwater in the area safe, but city and state officials are pushing for more monitoring and other improvements.
New buoys will divide activities in lagoon
State crews are replacing the buoys in the lagoon of Ala Moana Beach Park that separate stand-up paddleboarders from swimmers.
Four years ago the Department of Land and Natural Resources installed seven "spar buoys" between the shoreline and the reef to create a stand-up paddleboard corridor. Some of the buoys are saturated with water and began sinking. So the department will replace them with a different kind of buoy that should be more water-resistant.
A small team of DLNR employees will be staging on the beach at Magic Island and using a jet ski during the operation.
The state created the stand-up paddleboard corridor after complaints by swimmers about the rising popularity of paddleboarding in the area. After the buoys were installed, the state said complaints dropped significantly.
