Editorial: Sidestepping Red Hill tanks

Step by deliberate step, safe-water advocates have rightly been pressing the U.S. Navy to do the right thing on its aging underground fuel tanks at Red Hill: Get moving on redoubling the tanks’ structural integrity, or relocate them altogether.

So it was something of a sidestep last week, when a state Department of Health (DOH) hearing officer recommended that the Navy be approved for a five-year permit to continue operating the 20 massive fuel tanks, despite mounting doubts about the Navy’s ability to do so safely.

During the months-long contested-case hearing on the permit application, a July report by the DOH’s own Environmental Health Administration (EHA) said the Navy had not proved it can safely operate the tanks, which sit just 100 feet above an aquifer supplying drinking water to some 763,000 Oahu residents.

“Given the documented history of releases at the site, the uncertainty associated with the Navy’s groundwater model, and the lack of treatment or recovery systems in place to date, the Navy has not met its burden of demonstrating that this facility is protective of human health and the environment from potentially ‘significant’ future releases,” wrote James Paige, a deputy attorney general for the EHA.

That history includes the 2014 leak of 27,000 gallons of fuel. Though attributed to human error rather than tank corrosion, the incident threw a needed spotlight on the conditions, monitoring and risks of the World War II-era tanks, each able to store about 12.5 million gallons of fuel.

It falls to the DOH director to make the final permit decision. But the report by hearing officer Lou Chang is hefty — and his 99-page recommended approval does come with necessary, weighty conditions.

While it met design and construction standards for the tanks, “the Navy’s actual performance of inspections and repairs to the Red Hill tanks is sorely deficient,” Chang found. Only nine of the 18 active tanks had been properly inspected for condition and integrity in the last 20 years; two tanks hadn’t been inspected in 38 years, while another hadn’t been inspected in 40 years.

That’s stunning — and reveals a woeful, worrisome level of laxity. What else is unknown about the tanks’ condition and their upkeep?

Among Chang’s recommendations: that any tank not properly inspected and repaired by Dec. 31, 2024, be removed from active use until inspected and repaired; and that the Navy provide annual progress reports to the DOH on inspections and repairs.

All that, at the very least, must be conditioned if the five-year permit is approved. And in that period, the Navy should work apace to realize the goal of double-lining tanks or relocating them altogether — not just maintain the status quo.