In its first week of draining the massive fuel tanks at the Navy’s underground Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, the military task force responsible for defueling said it had safely removed 16,299,594 gallons from the facility as of 2 p.m. Friday.
Joint Task Force Red Hill officially began draining the tanks, which sit 100 feet above a critical aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water, on Monday. The task force has spent over a year preparing for the operation, including making repairs to the facility and the pipelines that connect the World War II-era tanks.
According to updates posted online to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, the commercial tanker Empire State left Pearl Harbor on Thursday carring approximately 12 million gallons of fuel from Red Hill.
In a media release by JTF-RH on Friday, the task force said it is moving fuel from the underground Red Hill tanks to the above-ground storage tanks at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to support the military’s daily training and operational requirements.
The release said that Sunday is a “crew rest day” but that next week JTF-RH intends to continue transfer fuel from Red Hill to the merchant oil tankers Empire State and Torm Thunder at Pearl Harbor’s Kilo Pier.
When defueling began Monday, there were 104 million gallons of jet fuel and marine diesel stored in the Red Hill tanks. Over the course of defueling, tankers will haul the fuel to facilities in West Oahu run by Island Energy Services at Campbell Industrial Park, to a fuel storage point in San Diego, a fuel storage point in the Philippines at Subic Bay and another fuel storage point in Singapore.
The move to defuel the tanks was prompted by a November 2021 incident at Red Hill in which jet fuel leaked into the Navy’s water system, which serves 93,000 people on Oahu, including military families and civilians in former military housing areas.
Local officials had long warned that storing the fuel reserve over the aquifer threatened Oahu’s water supply, but for years the Navy insisted that the facility was safe and that it was critical to supporting the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s vast regional operations. After the November 2021 spill, the Pentagon initially resisted a state emergency order to drain the tanks, asserting Hawaii had no legal authority to make it do so.
But in March 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the military would drain the tanks and permanently close the facility. Navy officials began acknowledging that the facility had fallen into a state of deep disrepair and that it needed extensive work to safely remove the fuel without risking further spills or threats to the aquifer.
Austin also said the military would pursue a new “distributed” model of storing fuel at various locations around the Pacific as well as “afloat locations” aboard tankers. Austin’s announcement contradicted Navy officials’ arguments about Red Hill being critical for operations as he argued that taking the fuel out of Red Hill would make military supply lines in the Pacific more “resilient” and keep fuel closer to where U.S. forces would need it in the event of a conflict or crisis.
JTF-RH expects to remove most of the fuel from the Red Hill tanks by the end of January, with commercial tankers coming in and out of Pearl Harbor to haul it. But the long-term closure and remediation of the facility by the Navy is expected to take at least three years.
