Editorial: Get facts straight on Red Hill water

By now it should be indisputable that for years the public has lacked sufficient information about what was going on in the aquifer below the Navy’s Red Hill underground fuel storage facility.

It’s an especially pertinent observation now, in the months since water contamination from mishaps came to light in November, affecting thousands of largely military families served by the affected Red Hill well.

Now there is a dizzying array of data competing for attention. Much of it is distressing, coming as it does from the agency tasked with keeping water resources safe to drink.

A pair of revelations last week caused quite an uproar, but ultimately, there was context provided to the public. There’s no cause to panic now, experts agreed, but there is a clear need for ongoing, thorough follow- up testing of water wells to know where problems could arise.

On Thursday, the Honolulu Board of Water Supply announced that petroleum-related chemicals had been detected in a monitoring well in Moanalua Valley. The board manager and chief engineer, Ernie Lau, has hoped that the shutdown of three wells in the early days of the crisis would make it less likely that the contaminants would be drawn toward civilian water supplies.

It’s too soon to know for certain that this is what’s happened, he said, but even this preliminary indicator reinforces the agency’s call for an accelerated pace for defueling the Navy’s Red Hill massive storage tanks. It’s a call joined by state health regulators, environmental activists and many Oahu residents.

Also last week, researchers from the University of Hawaii-Manoa Water Resources Research Center who have formed a Red Hill task force issued a news release about a new data dashboard open to the public at redhill.hawaii.edu/app_direct/redhill_dashboard.

The data comes from a screening process that can show where petroleum contaminants could be located, according to the task force. The fact that it pointed to possibly lingering water contamination at Red Hill, months after the Navy declared it safe to drink, set off alarm bells.

Initially, more alarms sounded when UH pulled back the announcement and postponed the news conference set for last Tuesday. In response, the Sierra Club of Hawai‘i requested copies of emails under the Uniform Information Practices Act, to clarify what was amiss.

Nothing was wrong, UH spokesman Dan Meisenzahl insisted at the rescheduled conference on Friday. Nothing in the dashboard or its findings had changed in the interim. “We needed to step back and do a better job explaining all of this,” he added.

No argument there. Already the Board of Water Supply and the state Department of Health (DOH) had raised concerns that the methodology used by the UH researchers, “fluorescence spectroscopy,” was limited in what it could conclude about drinking water, and that it is prone to false positives. It is not certified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Care must be taken in how the information is presented.

The bottom line, however, is that information can be helpful and should be fully presented. In particular this applies to the state DOH’s enforcement of its emergency order governing the fate of the tank storage complex. On July 22, the Health Department rejected the Navy’s plan for safely defueling the facility as lacking additional, necessary data to meet regulatory requirements. The new deadline for that is Aug. 31.

Officials, and the Oahu public they represent, must not forget that the Navy has been slow to provide any data on how underground water could be affected, ever since the fuel storage problems first came to light in 2014.

It is much better to have the facts, supplemented by guidance on how to interpret the information, than to continue stumbling along in the dark.