Column: Military chooses slow, most expensive solution for Red Hill

With Hawaii’s legislative committee members questioning the Navy on July 19 about alternative solutions to defueling the Red Hill fuel tanks, I propose a solution that will be faster and cheaper than the Navy’s current vague plan.

Having served 29 years in the U.S. military, I realize that the military, the U.S. Congress and the defense-industry cultures allow huge, generally unquestioned, spending on special projects — and defueling the Red Hill tanks is certainly a special project. I’m no engineer, but having been in the military for three decades, I can spot mismanagement and overexpenditure of taxpayers’ dollars by the U.S. military — and the Navy’s defueling plan certainly falls into that category.

If the military is really going to close the 80-year-old Red Hill tank and pipe system, then why spend hundreds of millions of dollars to repair so many aspects of it? Instead, common sense tells us that the military should be looking for ways to more quickly and less expensively remove the fuel and get the job done in months rather than years.

The danger to Honolulu’s aquifer from fuel leaking from the tanks exists now.

We cannot wait for two years for massive repairs to the Red Hill tank farm and pipe system before removing the fuel, when there are cheaper and faster alternatives to the extraordinarily expensive massive repairs called for by the report.

The 100 million gallons of jet fuel in the tanks does not need to be piped down 3 miles from Red Hill to the aboveground fuel tanks at Pearl Harbor, some of which are over 100 years old. Nor does it need to go by the existing pipe network to Hotel Pier at Pearl Harbor Naval Base to be put into fuel tanker ships.

A fast defueling solution is to make whatever repairs to the individual tanks necessary to move the fuel out by a shorter pipe system to the closest entrance of Red Hill. The fuel would then be put into 7,500-gallon-capacity tanker trucks similar to the system used at commercial refineries that move fuel from aboveground tanks for delivery to gas stations.

The tank trucks would move the fuel to whatever site is designated to receive the fuel: the above-ground tanks at Pearl Harbor or Hotel Pier for ship fuel tankers, which could be refueling the RIMPAC ships now here, or to PAR Hawaii’s above-ground tanks in Kapolei that reportedly have a 60-million-gallon storage capacity.

With 50 trucks each carrying 7,500 gallons, making 10 trips in a 24-hour period, with three union drivers working eight-hour shifts, they can move 3.75 million gallons per day. On this schedule, it would take 27 days to drain the 100 million gallons from the Red Hill tanks — not two years!

Even if the Navy would pay for only half that number of tanker trucks, it would take 25 trucks working 24-hour days less than two months — only 54 days — to drain the 100 million gallons.

If there are not sufficient fuel tank trucks on Oahu, the Navy could fly additional tanker trucks into Hawaii, similar to the airlift of the massive granulated activated carbon tanks that “filtered” the fuel-contaminated water at residential areas around Pearl Harbor Naval Base and Hickam Air Base in December and January.

For the sake of Oahu’s water and residents, let’s try to make this work.

Honolulu resident Ann Wright is retired U.S. Army/Army Reserves colonel, who also was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years before resigning in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.