Matson will not pass on cleanup and damage costs for last week’s spill of 233,000 gallons of molasses into Honolulu Harbor to its customers or to taxpayers, according to the shipping company’s president.
"We’re not going to charge our customers more as a result of this spill," Matson Inc. President and CEO Matt Cox told reporters following a boat tour of the harbor Monday with several state legislators.
One week after the disaster, the waters are clearing of the thick, dark molasses plume — but boat crews have already pulled some 25,000 dead fish from the harbor and surface waters near Keehi Lagoon, and the largest concentration of coral in the harbor is mostly dead, state officials say.
Some of the hundreds of coral heads killed by the molasses spill had been there as long as 35 years, Department of Land and Natural Resources Director William Aila said Monday. DLNR is working with federal ocean and wildlife officials to draft a mitigation plan for the spill, he added.
"We can’t undo this but we can make it right," Cox said during the briefing. "We’ve let you down. We’re very sorry."
Matson is the only company to ship molasses from Hawaii in bulk. It plans eventually to release its findings on what caused the spill, but doesn’t yet know when that report will be ready, Cox said.
The spill was reported Sept. 9, and investigators determined the next day that 1,400 tons of Matson-pumped molasses had leaked through a fist-size hole in a corroded steel pipe below Pier 52, where Horizon Lines Inc. operates.
The disaster has raised new concerns about whether sufficient regulatory oversight exists for all the harbor’s operations. Transfers of oils, fuels and hazardous materials on Oahu are "stringently" regulated by government agencies, but the transfer of molasses — a byproduct of sugar refining — is not regulated at all, officials say.
Matson, state agencies and state legislators said Monday that they’ll look at what policy changes are needed to guard against such a spill recurring.
State transportation officials further say they’re unsure whether any other nonhazardous substances similar to molasses are shipped out of Hawaii waters in bulk quantities — and under the radar of regulators.
"I think there are lots of unanswered questions that we will need to look at as legislators about inspections, responsibility, maintenance — all those questions that the public has been asking," Rep. Della Au Belatti (D, Moiliili-Makiki-Tantalus) said Monday. Belatti is chairwoman of the House Committee on Health and joined Monday’s boat tour.
Before last week’s spill as many as 2,000 tons of molasses were pumped onto Matson vessels in the harbor and exported to Oakland, Calif. Although it has exported the liquid from Hawaii since 1983, Matson officials acknowledge they had no response plan for such a spill.
"With the benefit of hindsight, we should have," Cox said Monday.
The company further did not track the volume of molasses traveling through the pipeline as it was transferred to Matson’s vessels, said Chris Lee, Matson’s incident commander.
Typically, during the liquid’s transfer, a vessel crew member would monitor the tank as it was filled on the ship, and when it was full would phone personnel at the molasses tanks to stop pumping, Lee said.
"The system is not very sophisticated," he added.
The company leases its Sand Island pier space from the state Department of Transportation. Matson owns the pipeline where the leak occurred and is responsible for keeping it in good working order under the terms of its state lease, DOT Director Glenn Okimoto said Monday.
DOT, which oversees Hawaii’s harbors, has never inspected the pipeline as far as he knows, Okimoto said. But the department is now considering whether it needs to regularly inspect the pipeline. Molasses is the only substance that flows through the pipeline where the leak occurred, Matson officials say.
The company’s molasses export operations are on hold until it’s considered safe to resume, Cox said. The company is prepared to quit exporting molasses if it can’t be "completely sure that this will not happen again," he said.
It’s too early to estimate how much the cleanup and damage will cost — or whether the steps needed to prevent a future leak will make it worth Matson’s effort to resume molasses exports, Cox added.
"It’s not a large part of our operation," he said.
The company has operated in the Aloha State for 131 years, he said.
"We’re from Hawaii. We love Hawaii. We consider ourselves stewards of the land, stewards of the ocean, and we failed in that responsibility last week," Cox said. "I will tell you, as a group of employees, each of us feels devastated by the impact to the marine life because of the spill."
Nearby Keehi Lagoon, which also was affected by the spill, remains closed to the public for commercial and recreational use until further notice.
