The emptying of 480,000 gallons of jet fuel from four Red Hill underground surge tanks was completed last Friday — and the fact that the operation didn’t make front-page banner headlines bodes well. That implies that things went smoothly — with no known mishaps, under the watchful eyes of state Department of Health and other environmental monitors.
The 12-day defueling was a mere prelude to a much larger — and much more fraught — operation to start in mid-October: the draining of some 104 million gallons of jet fuel from the massive Red Hill bulk storage facility, which sit just 100 feet above a crucial aquifer. The four surge tanks had been an integral component of moving fuel between the 20 huge storage tanks — but with the imminent closure of the entire facility, they are no longer needed. The surge tanks’ fuel was transferred to above-ground tanks at Pearl Harbor-
Hickam for use in military operations.
Also last Friday: Joint Task Force-Red Hill (JTF-RH), the military body created to drain the facility safely and expeditiously, sought to further assure the public on the upcoming mega defueling, by inviting news media to a fire-emergency training exercise held in a submarine to simulate Red Hill conditions. Throughout the three-month defueling process, National Guard members and reservists will rove in security and fire-watch teams to check on pipes, flanges and valves, looking for potential leaks, spills or fires.
All this training and eyes on scene will be critical to prevent any fuel spills that might further contaminate Oahu’s groundwater — or any fires that could ignite a major disaster.
In fact, longstanding problems about Red Hill’s firefighting system continue coming to light — exposed by reporting and revelations that now belie the Navy’s earlier assurances that things were safe, sound and under control at the facility.
As recently as March 2021, a Navy memo outlined ongoing concerns about the fire-suppression system — that over at least the last six years, the system has experienced “unexpected operational failure.” That caused it not to be fully functional in case of fire: Instead of automatically deploying both water and firefighting foam, as needed and designed, only water would be activated; the firefighting foam would have to be turned on manually (see 808ne.ws/Redhillfire Opens in a new tab).
It’s not clear exactly how these known flaws in the fire-suppression system — known to the Navy, that is, but not to the public — factored into the disastrous Red Hill fuel spills in 2021, in May then November. It was in May 2021 that an improperly handled fuel transfer gushed some 17,000 gallons into a fire-suppression retention line, where the fuel sat and sagged the PVC pipe until six months later, when a worker in a cart hit and ruptured the line, pouring out the trapped fuel. Those events contaminated the water of 93,000 area users, sickening hundreds and spurring months of evacuations; they also forced the shutdown of a major civilian water shaft, as a precaution. Rightly, lawsuits have been filed over illnesses, and congressional action is advancing over medical tracking of those exposed to Red Hill’s fuel-tainted water.
One thing is clear: The necessity of a fully functional, reliable fire-suppression system for the safety of Red Hill and all nearby. “The fire protection system at Red Hill is absolutely critical to protect the Department of Defenses’ largest fuel facility in the event of a fire,” said the Navy’s 2021 memo, in calling for contractor fixes.
This makes crystal clear that there is no room for
error as Red Hill draining moves into its most critical stages, with repacking of the fuel lines to start later this month. Military transparency remains vital, of course — as does healthy public skepticism of operations as JTF-RH starts defueling the 104 million gallons from storage, two months from now.
