Editorial: Scrutinize Navy’s weak water system

It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t have happened at all.

A 36-inch water main, providing water to about 93,000 residents, businesses and institutions in the Pearl Harbor complex, gave way on Friday. Not only are families having to deal with a boil-water order while the Navy works through a projected seven to 10 days of repairs, but the crucial, planned start to the Red Hill defueling process has now been put on hold for at least that long.

The water-pipe breaks came just as the Navy was to start “unpacking” 1 million gallons of fuel from lines serving its Red Hill storage facility, where leaks and mishaps have posed a water contamination threat for years.

This latest water issue burst into the news late last week with an initial break to a pipe installed in 1951, said Capt. Mark Sohaney, commander of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, speaking at a news conference on Monday.

It was to be the first of at least four breaks that turned up in the system, including one the result of an unrelated car crash. The diversion of water to deal with those two breaks put pressure on a third area in West Loch that also sprang a leak.

And then, as if to put a capstone on the whole mess, a fourth break occurred just before Monday’s news conference, flooding Navy homes on Pearl City Peninsula.

This is a grim development, one that should compel an assessment of conditions across the Navy’s water delivery network, most immediately of the sections that would be involved in the imminent start of the Red Hill defueling process. The Navy must be able to assure that the planned work on the fuel lines can be conducted safely.

The brunt of the current water-main crisis is being felt by thousands of residents, mostly part of the Navy community. They are the very same people whose lives last fall were disrupted when fuel contaminants were discovered in their water supply.

That contamination was what drove state health officials to demand, and the military eventually to accept, that the Red Hill complex of 20 massive fuel tanks would have to be defueled and deactivated.

The immediate repercussions of the main breaks included Monday’s closure of Iroquois Point Elementary, which had insufficient water pressure for flushing of toilets. The network of child development centers was shut down; the loss of child care affected some 3,000 people, Sohaney said.

He added that the Navy was “in dialogue” with the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, managers of the drinking-water system for Oahu’s civilian population, about a possible Navy connection to its system, though no connection has been made yet.

So while the focus rightly is on helping Navy families, schools, offices and businesses catering to that population, it’s also clear that the military’s main breaks could have ripple effects on the community at large.

Water main breaks bring their own contamination hazards to any water system, particularly to one that is plainly aging. The concern raised by experts is that soil and bacteria can find their way into the water through the breach.

That’s the last thing anyone wants to see happen.

The risk of the Red Hill fuel facility, located just above the principal aquifer for the island, became a priority concern for state and federal environmental health officials after a major spill within the containment structure in 2014. Since then the Navy, pressed to implement reinforcements to prevent a leak, had maintained for years that the system could be managed safely.

But in the last year, contamination crises, now coupled with evidence of deteriorating water pipes, have shown that to be false. And the Navy’s long course to earn back the public trust has just grown longer.