Editorial: Red Hill tanks need proaction

Seven years ago, the Navy reported a 27,000-gallon jet fuel leak at one of 20 aging tanks in its underground Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage facility, and later said it was caused by a contractor’s poorly performed work and the military’s own insufficient oversight.

Ever since, Navy Region Hawaii has been haggling with the site’s regulators over what constitutes a suitable long-term solution for safely maintaining a massive supply of of petroleum for ships and jets, with fuel being funneled to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

The leak incident, reported in January 2014, rightly raises potential health and safety concerns that should be addressed at a stepped-up pace — given that the facility’s tanks sit a mere 100 feet above an aquifer that Honolulu’s Board of Water Supply (BWS) depends on to provide water to residents from Moanalua to Hawaii Kai.

In late October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state Health Department rejected key parts of a Navy proposal to improve the Red Hill fuel farm with upgrades that include holding onto use of single-wall tanks — a fix that the regulators said fell short of the mark for “most protective of the groundwater and drinking water.”

In a recent response, the Navy countered that while it still views its single-wall plan as satisfying requirements for a safe and effective upgrade, it’s now working with industry to see whether existing technology could provide some type of double-wall secondary containment — a far more expensive remedy, but one that the BWS and others have suggested in recent years.

That’s very welcome forward motion, in lieu of more foot-dragging. In a September 2019 document, the Navy said, in the long run, it wanted to implement “double-wall equivalency secondary containment” — or remove fuel from Red Hill in approximately the 2045 time frame.

Located a few miles from Pearl Harbor, Red Hill consists of vertically arrayed 250-foot-tall underground tanks — construction started before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Oahu, and finished in 1943. Should the Navy forgo the double-wall remedy and wait until 2045 to completely remove the fuel, the tanks would be about 100 years old.

Also encouraging in the latest Navy statement is an apparent admission that although the price tag for double-wall technology tailored for Red Hill appears to be too steep to be deemed “fiscally-responsible,” in the Navy’s view, it is “committed to finding a solution for secondary containment.”

In 2018 the Navy estimated the cheapest single-wall option would cost $180 million to $450 million. The tank-within-a-tank option was pegged at between $2 billion and $5 billion. Replacing the tank farm with similarly fortified underground or concrete-encased fuel tanks would run as much as $10 billion.

Hawaii has long had a sort of symbiotic relationship with the Navy. In this case, the military needs the land at the Red Hill to fuel support vessels and aircraft in its Pacific theater. And in the last 15 years, the Navy has dedicated a steady flow of funding to modernization, monitoring wells and other sources to verify safe conditions.

Still, the threat of tainted water looms alarmingly larger as the facility ages. The Board of Water Supply very sensibly pointed out that for the sake of protecting the aquifer’s long-term ability to provide safe drinking water, the Navy should pursue a plan to install double-lined tanks. If that’s not possible, then the military should initiate action to relocate the tanks away from the potable water source.

The EPA describes the facility, which can store up to 250 million gallons of fuel, as “unlike any other in the United States.” But, as the BWS has pointed out, underneath it, our drinking water aquifer, too, is the only one of its kind, and cannot be replaced.