A temporary vent at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility undergoes final preparations before venting operations in Halawa, Hawaii, May 28, 2024. The vent was built to use fan power to pull fuel vapor from the fuel tanks inside the facility. (Glenn Slaughter/U.S. Navy)
HONOLULU (Tribune News Service) — Navy Closure Task Force-Red Hill announced on its mobile app last week that the state Department of Health had approved its plans to begin cleaning operations and venting of the facility’s Tank No. 8.
It’s the latest step in the closure process of the Red Hill facility. But some residents are nervous about potential health and environmental risks as the plan moves forward.
Walter Chun, a member of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative, said in an email that the Navy’s plan to “intentionally discharge the vapor and particulates from the 12.5M gallon fuel tank at Red Hill ... to the environment (risks) human exposures to hazardous substances, especially for children and infants, and pose a potential wildfire risk for the nearby residential neighborhoods.”
The Navy task force has installed nine air quality monitoring stations around Red Hill’s perimeter, including the at Halawa Correctional Facility. Navy officials said the stations will monitor air quality as well as atmospheric data such as air speed and wind direction.
“NCTF-RH has worked closely with DOH to ensure ventilation of the tanks is done in a manner that will not pose a risk to human health,” said task force deputy commander Rear Adm. Marc Williams in a statement included in the news release on the app. “Our team is committed to safely decommissioning the facility, and tank ventilation operations get us another step closer to this goal.”
In November 2021, JP-5 jet fuel stored at Red Hill tainted the Navy’s Oahu water system that serves 93,000 people. The facility sits just 100 feet above a critical aquifer which most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water and for years local health and water officials warned the fuel posed a serious risk to Oahu’s water supply. The Navy for its part insisted the World War II-era facility was safe and critical for national security.
After months of resisting a state emergency order to drain the tanks, in March 2022 the Pentagon announced that Red Hill would be defueled and permanently shut down.
It took a joint military task force nearly a year to make repairs and upgrades to the aging facility and the pipelines connecting them to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to safely extract over 104 million gallons of fuel from the tanks.
Repairs concluded in summer 2023 and by March the defueling task force had removed most of the fuel with the exception of residual sludge within the tanks that would require deeper cleaning to remove.
The defueling task force’s commander Vice Adm. John Wade told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an exit interview before NCTF-RH took over operations that while the removal of the fuel got one major risk out of the way, many more dangers remain before the closure process is over.
“Defueling had its own challenges and risks, closure and long-term environmental remediation will bring new challenges and new risks,” Wade said. “So it’s critical to the ... health of the workers and the community and the environment to focus on safety.”
During the February meeting of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative, the facility’s former fuel director Shannon Bencs attended and asked officials how they will approach community safety as they try to clear out gases and chemicals. “Now that you’ve de-fueled the tanks and the pipelines, now there’s poisonous toxic fumes in those tanks, and the only way to vent them out is through the top of Red Hill and then through the (vents),” Bencs said, warning that it will be “extremely toxic, and it will flow down to Halawa Valley and down to Pearl Harbor.”
Rear Adm. Stephen Barnett, commander of Navy Region Hawaii, told Bencs, “that is something that we’ll be working through as far as the ventilation,” and that the Navy would ensure the community would be notified.
Members of the CRI have been critical of officials, accusing them of withholding information and dodging questions. The Navy has in turn argued that CRI members have been aggressive and disrespectful. The EPA has called for a mediator to be brought in to manage the dispute.
“Although the CRI raised concerns with the allowance of discharging contaminants and pollutants in March 2024, both the Navy and EPA ignored these concerns,” said Chun. “Their focus since March was attempting to control the CRI meetings. Our focus in Hawaii must narrow in on the practices to allow intentional contaminants and pollutants to harm people and the environment.”
The CRI put out a public notice Wednesday night that said venting operations would begin the next day and will continue until all 14 tanks that held fuel are degassed, with operations set to take place daily between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. and advising “the discharge from the tanks is not filtered or captured. There is a risk of exposure to toxic fumes from the discharge. People are advised to be vigilant about their health.”
The CRI advised that people living or working in the vicinity of Moanalua, Salt Lake, Halawa Correctional Facility, and all military housing surrounding the Red Hill fuel tanks should be aware and recommended people consider limiting time outdoors and wearing masks.
In a Thursday media release, state health officials said their conditional approval of the venting plan requires the Navy to notify the public at least 12 hours before the start of venting a tank, and that it immediate notify the Health Department if it detects an “exceedance” of expected chemicals in the air and stop the venting.
The approval also limits the number of tanks that may be vented in a calendar year to six, the number of tanks that may be vented at any time to two, and requires the Navy to notify DOH within 24 hours of starting to vent a second tank.
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