State regulators and local water officials say they are just now learning of the existence of a lava tube that cuts across the water tunnel that flows into the Navy’s Red Hill drinking water well. The existence of the lava tube has raised alarm that the petroleum that leaked from the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility in 2021 may have quickly traveled to an unknown area of the aquifer.
“It is shocking, really, that the Navy knew about this and didn’t share this critical information about the Red Hill shaft, especially given how much risk depends on preferential pathways in the subsurface,” said Fenix Grange, who manages DOH’s Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response Office, in an email.
Grange said DOH officials, who have regulatory authority over the Red Hill facility, learned about the presence of the lava tube only when they read the Navy’s long- delayed investigation into 2021’s Red Hill contamination crisis, which was released Thursday.
Honolulu Board of Water Supply Manager and Chief Engineer Ernie Lau said that so far it’s the most alarming revelation that he has come across as he makes his way through the 234-page report that details how fuel from May 6 and Nov. 20, 2021, spills ended up in the Red Hill well. The fuel was then pumped into the Navy’s water system, which serves about 93,000 residents in neighborhoods in and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, sickening hundreds, if not thousands, of residents.
“The first thing I thought there …,” said Lau, who paused as he became emotional during a news conference Friday. “My goodness, last year there was actually fuel in Red Hill shaft, in that water development tunnel, floating on the water. … When you think of a lava tube, think of it as an actual pipe in the lava, in the rock itself, that’s completely open, and water can move freely through that lava tube. So where did it go? And how far is the fuel spreading in our aquifer?”
The existence of the lava tube is discreetly mentioned in a description of the Red Hill well that is contained in a supplemental investigation dated April 15 but not released until this week. The report supplements an initial January investigation that Pentagon commanders determined didn’t include a sufficient review of actions the Navy took in response to the May and November 2021 fuel leaks.
The report notes that the “lava tube cross cuts the water development tunnel about 300 feet before the end of the tunnel,” and says the length of the tube is unknown. No other information or discussion is provided about the lava tube, which is never again mentioned in the report.
Navy officials, who have repeatedly vowed transparency throughout the Red Hill crisis, did not respond to questions Friday about how and when the Navy became aware of the lava tube and why they didn’t disclose this to regulators or BWS officials.
We “haven’t been able to get in touch with the right people to answer this,” Navy spokesperson Lydia Robertson said by email.
The Red Hill water contamination affected only the Navy’s water system, which serves about 93,000 residents, and there have been no indications that the BWS water system, which serves the majority of Oahu residents, has been affected. But BWS officials quickly shut down three of its wells in 2021 as a precaution, which has resulted in pleas that residents and businesses scale back their water use to avoid mandatory water restrictions.
BWS officials have been working with environmental experts to try to gain a better understanding of how fuel might migrate in the aquifer, which sits just 100 feet below the Red Hill tanks, and the level of risk that could pose to its drinking water wells that serve southern Oahu. Lau has said that it could cost as much as $195 million to replace the lost capacity from the three closed wells if they can’t be brought back online.
This isn’t the first time that the Navy hasn’t shared what the BWS deems critical information. In the days after its November fuel leak, the Navy quietly shut down its Red Hill shaft on Nov. 28 without informing BWS. Lau, at the time, said that closing that well increased the risk that the spilled fuel could get sucked up into the Halawa shaft, one of the BWS’ primary sources of drinking water for metropolitan Honolulu.
Defueling Red Hill
On Friday there was also growing criticism of the Navy’s plan to defuel the Red Hill facility, which was also released Thursday. The Pentagon ordered the aging facility be closed earlier this year as anger mounted about the water contamination.
The defueling operation is not expected to be completed until the end of 2024 under the Navy’s plan, a timeline that Lau called “simply unacceptable.” He noted that it took three years to build the facility in the early 1940s and that it shouldn’t take the same amount of time to empty the tanks.
The Red Hill facility contains 20 massive underground tanks, each of which is capable of holding 12.5 million gallons of fuel.
A report by a third-party contractor released in May found that an alarming number of repairs to Red Hill’s pipeline system were needed to safely drain the tanks. The Navy’s defueling plan says supply chain disruptions could delay that work.
While environmentalists agree that defueling Red Hill needs to proceed with caution, they expressed skepticism at the lengthy timeline and lack of specificity in the Navy’s plan, including cost estimates.
“Everyone wants to make sure that the fuel gets out of the facility safely. We don’t want to have another spill. So we are not talking about doing it hastily,” Earthjustice attorney David Henkin told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” livestream program. “But there is a lot of daylight between doing it hastily and doing it at a snail’s pace.”
Henkin questioned why the Navy wants to give itself four to eight months to drain the tanks after all the repairs are made.
“When the Navy wants to do something quickly, it does,” said Henkin. “And when it wants to drag its feet, it does.”
