Water use on Oahu continues rising

Water use on Oahu has continued to increase since November, despite the Honolulu Board of Water Supply urging residents to implement conservation measures after a fuel leak at the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility resulted in the closing of three municipal wells.

The Board of Water Supply closed those wells as a precautionary measure to make sure that spilled fuel, which contaminated the Navy’s drinking water system, didn’t migrate into its own wells.

The increased water use bodes poorly for summer, when water demand will likely rise during the drier months, boosting the chance that BWS will have to impose mandatory water conservation measures or even restrict new construction in urban Oahu because there isn’t enough water.

“It’s going to be very challenging right now,” Ernie Lau, chief engineer and manager of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” livestream program Monday. “I want to manage people’s expectations. We are going to be in this crisis situation for multiple years.”

Lau has urged Oahu residents, particularly in urban Oahu, to reduce their water consumption by 10% through strategies such as limiting showers to five minutes and restricting activities such as watering lawns and washing cars.

Lau said Oahu lost 17.5 million gallons a day of water capacity as a result of closing the three wells. The primary well, the Halawa shaft, comprises 20% of the water supply from Halawa to Hawaii Kai.

Islandwide, water use has increased since the beginning of the year, when daily pumping from wells averaged about 120 million gallons a day, or mgd, according to BWS data. The average is now heading toward 140 mgd. Water use in Honolulu has been relatively flat in recent weeks but is still higher than at the start of the year.

Lau said closure of the Halawa shaft, as well as its Aiea and Halawa wells, is indefinite and dependent on an investigation into the contamination of the aquifer, which could take several years. In addition to the November spill at Red Hill, there have been dozens of leaks from the underground Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility since it was built in the 1940s.

The Board of Water Supply has for years been concerned that those fuel releases could eventually migrate across the valley and into its municipal wells. Lau said he’d heard secondhand that fuel had recently been detected in Navy monitoring wells, which can detect groundwater contamination and the direction in which it may be moving.

Neither the Navy nor the state Department of Health, which regulates Red Hill, responded to the Star- Advertiser’s inquiries Monday about whether fuel had indeed been detected, and if so, at what levels. The Navy also didn’t respond to questions about whether fuel from the November spill continues to leak into its Red Hill shaft, which has also been closed since November.

Lau said that as the investigation continues into the extent and potential movement of the Red Hill leak, BWS has begun exploring alternative sources of water. But it typically takes five to seven years to develop a replacement well. BWS has not provided an estimate on the cost, but officials have cautioned in recent months that it’s an expensive process and that those costs are typically passed on to consumers.

Lau on Monday said he hoped the federal government would step in and cover those costs.

“The problem was created by them. There was adequate, I think, warning to them over many, many years that they knew they had problems there,” said Lau. “And we, for at least the last eight years, have been advocating for protection of the water resources, preventing the disaster we are kind of in right now.”

Congress has already proffered $1.1 billion to address the crisis at Red Hill, and on Monday, Hawaii’s congressional delegation announced that President Joe Biden had inserted another $1 billion into his proposed 2023 budget, which still needs congressional approval.

The funds allocated during this current fiscal year are largely going toward addressing immediate costs of the water emergency, such as paying for the alternative housing and per diem expenses incurred by families on the Navy’s water system, extensive testing of the water system and remediation of the Navy’s Red Hill shaft.

The $1 billion funding request for 2023 is expected go toward draining the Red Hill fuel tanks and shutting down the facility, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered earlier this month.

The Navy is expected to submit a plan for shutting down Red Hill by May 31, while defueling the tanks could take up to a year.

“The president’s budget proposal signals the administration’s support of our efforts to safely defuel and shut down Red Hill. Ultimately, Congress holds the purse strings, so I look forward to working with the president as we move our budget and appropriations process forward this year,” said U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Ed Case also issued a statement saying he was committed to help securing all needed funding.

“Full remediation, defueling and closure of Red Hill and identification of alternative strategic fuel storage capacity in the Indo-Pacific will take sustained federal funding in the billions over several fiscal years,” said Case.