(Tribune News Service) — Navy officials are urging community members to attend a "kickoff and scoping meeting " hosted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as it prepares to launch its Community Representation Initiative to oversee defueling operations at the Navy's Red Hill fuel storage facility.

Karnig Ohannessian, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for environment and mission readiness, is visiting Oahu to attend the meeting. The initiative is part of a federal consent degree requiring public input and participation in the military's efforts to drain the massive storage tanks, which sit just 100 feet above a critical aquifer that most of Honolulu relies on for clean drinking water.

Among the provisions is the creation of a 10-person panel to review Red Hill information and provide input on decisions related to closure, defueling and ensuring that drinking water stays safe.

"This first meeting will be about helping the community set its own rules about nomination selection representation, " Ohannessian told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. "Then subsequent to that those representatives will be in the actual working meetings, which are scheduled to happen twice a quarter."

In November 2021, fuel from Red Hill contaminated the Navy's Oahu drinking water system that serves 93, 000 people, including military and civilian families living in former military housing areas such as Kapilina Beach Homes. After months of resisting a state emergency order to drain the tanks, the Pentagon in March 2022 announced it would permanently shutter the Red Hill facility.

Well before 2021, officials at the state Department of Health and the Honolulu Board of Water Supply raised concerns about storing fuel above the island's water supply, but Navy officials insisted the World War II-era facility was safe and necessary to support its operations in the Pacific.

Since then, officials have admitted the facility had fallen into a state of deep disrepair and required extensive repairs and upgrades to remove the 104 million gallons it currently stores safely.

The Red Hill water crisis has seriously strained relations between Hawaii residents and Navy leaders and prompted some island residents to rethink their relationship with the military.

Ohannessian said he wants to "do everything I can to make sure that the public has the confidence that it truly is a public forum. It is a community forum, and the Navy is not shaping it in any way. We are 100 % committed to this being as open and transparent and as representative of the community as possible. So that's why we're asking the EPA to do the facilitation, not Navy, for this meeting."

Defueling operations are set to begin in October and will be conducted by Joint Task Force Red Hill, a military organization formed to drain the tanks. The task force has been doing repairs and upgrades to the aging facility and the pipeline system that connects it to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to prepare for the defueling.

When JTF Red Hill began operations, it had a projected timeline of completion by summer 2024. Its commander, Vice Adm. John Wade, announced in June that his team had found ways to expedite the process, with most of the defueling set to be complete by the end of January. But ultimately, the remediation and shutdown of the facility by the Navy is expected to take years.

Ohannessian said that today's public forum "will succeed to the extent that the community believes in it, trusts it and wants to participate in it."

"I have no reason to think that that won't happen, " he added. "It is, after all, a forum that was created because of community input. And I just want to assure the community by my presence and active participation on this meeting and subsequent meetings that this is important for us to be able to do our work well."

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