Progress in deterring tank leaks is reported

Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that the Navy’s plan to secure and prevent future leaks at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility is moving forward and making progress.

“We’ve got a lot to show for,” the EPA’s Steve Linder told the Honolulu Board of Water Supply from San Francisco during a videoconference call.

But others at the public meeting in Honolulu blasted the EPA and the Navy for dragging their feet 2-1/2 years after 27,000 gallons of jet fuel leaked at Red Hill.

“There’s a definite lack of urgency,” Pulama Long testified.

Joshua Noga, conservation coordinator with the Sierra Club of Hawaii, described the Navy’s plan as “woefully inadequate.”

Long and Noga were among a handful of people in a standing-room-only crowd in the agency’s boardroom who urged the EPA to safeguard an aquifer that supplies drinking water to a quarter of Oahu’s population.

The Navy’s 20 underground jet fuel storage tanks are on the ridge between Moanalua and Halawa valleys, with the lowest tank situated roughly 100 feet above the aquifer.

In January 2014, when one of the tanks leaked some 27,000 gallons of jet fuel, many were worried the groundwater below had been fouled. But tests on drinking water samples taken since the incident have largely fallen within state and federal standards.

State and city officials and the public have voiced concern about the continued use of the facility and the potential for the fuel to eventually migrate into the city’s water supply.

Earlier this month the Board of Water Supply picked apart details of the Navy’s plan in a formal response to the EPA, saying some of the proposed actions are based on untested assumptions and gaps in data.

In other instances, the board said, the Navy ignores scientific data that could help it track the jet fuel leaked from Tank 5 in 2014.

In addition, dozens of other flaws in the plan were noted in a 17-page letter to the EPA and signed by Board of Water Supply Manager Ernest Lau.

The board urged the EPA and the state Health Department to push the Navy into providing the necessary information.

“Otherwise the regulatory agencies may be perceived as ignoring their public trust responsibility to protect our drinking water resource,” Lau wrote.

In September the Navy and the Defense Logistics Agency agreed to take immediate and long-term actions to ease the threat of leaks at the Red Hill facility.

An “Agreement on Consent” negotiated among the Navy, Defense Logistics Agency, EPA and state Health Department charts a 22-year plan expected to cost tens of millions of dollars.

On Monday officials with the EPA and the state Health Department met with the board to update the status of the project.

EPA officials said they were looking at various tank upgrade alternatives, including double- and single-wall designs. New leak detection alternatives are also in the works, as are new ways to investigate and remediate future leaks and evaluate and protect groundwater sources.

Linder said the plan calls for the construction of four new monitoring wells in and around the Red Hill tanks, with the potential for more if necessary.

Board member Adam C. Wong pointed out that 100 or more monitoring wells were built as part of a cleanup of an Air Force base in New Mexico.

Linder replied that the geology was different in that cleanup and that, in any case, it will cost $300,000 apiece to construct wells in the rock around Red Hill.

Federal officials also said they would require the Navy to test for only 12 compounds despite the Navy previously agreeing to test for 64 compounds. The Navy has collected quarterly samples of the 64 compounds at the storage site since 2005.

Linder explained that 52 of the 64 compounds generally were not detected in the samples, and the reason is because they are not found in the fuel stored at Red Hill.

Marti Townsend, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, said reduced compound monitoring isn’t acceptable considering what’s at stake: the possible contamination of Honolulu’s drinking water.

“You’re never going to find what you’re not looking for,” she said after the meeting.