New Environment Protection Agency (EPA) findings confirm that the Navy has failed to adequately protect households on its own water system from continued exposure to petroleum hydrocarbon from the underground Red Hill storage facility. That’s a completely unacceptable outcome — subjecting households, including military-affiliated families with young children, to chemicals that cause digestive problems, skin rashes and other illnesses in the short term, and could cause other chronic or degenerative illnesses over time.
Yet despite the risk of harm attached — dire enough that the Department of Defense has ordered the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility drained of its 104 million gallons in a special operation, and permanently closed at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion — the Navy continues to deflect concern. It continues to justify its inadequate response at the household level, stonewalling worried families.
The problem is that despite Navy reports of “all clear” since March 2022 of water flowing to homes via a system that had been contaminated by fuel in 2021, the EPA reported just last week that trace elements of petroleum have been found in taps. The trace findings confirm that petroleum remnants are flowing through faucets from some source — likely hot water heaters or some aspect of the plumbing that retained fuel. Yet despite multiple complaints by water users, including renewed symptoms of exposure to petroleum hydrocarbon traces or other contaminants, the Navy hasn’t done what it should — find the problem and fix it.
Requests to test or replace hot water heaters and other possible sources have gone unheeded. Enough is enough. With serious health effects on the line, the Navy must immediately act to identify and remove or replace all potential sources of hazard.
In October, when the EPA had the Navy test the water in four homes where residents complained of symptoms consistent with drinking fuel-contaminated water, it found traces of total petroleum hydrocarbon in three, within a range from 56 to 71 parts per billion (ppb). And while the state Department of Health (DOH) has set an “action level” of contamination at 266 ppb, the EPA has not determined that exposure in less concentrated amounts is safe — only that the contamination isn’t high enough to trigger mandatory remediation efforts.
These cases, it must be emphasized, aren’t a first finding of contamination. They are a follow-up to the known fouling of the Navy water system by jet fuel — poisoning a system serving 93,000 people and sickening users — in November 2021. That disaster prompted the Navy to shut down its Red Hill water shaft on Nov. 28, 2021.
The next day, Hawaii’s DOH released an advisory warning against use of water in the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (JBPHH) system — but the Navy contradicted this advice, telling residents in sections where it did not detect jet fuel that the water was safe. Within days, many of those wrongly advised that their water was safe were sickened, and eventually, Navy testing techniques were found unreliable.
Critics, including the Sierra Club of Hawaii, warn that the Navy hasn’t learned from its mistakes, calling for an independent body to oversee investigation and remediation so that water users aren’t again misled. Navy footdragging in the face of these recent complaints bolsters that recommendation.
The Navy has agreed to investigate the latest finding of contaminated water, and, as the EPA recommends, the Navy must dig deeper and test more widely to identify the source of these toxic traces. Given the magnitude of the Red Hill operation, it’s confounding that there should be any resistance to replacing hot water heaters and/or plumbing if necessary. Some residents have been asking for this mitigation since 2021.
No more evidence is required to see that the Navy has been wrong to deny its water users’ concerns, and must act immediately to not only identify, but remedy the problem.
Correction: An earlier version of this editorial mischaracterized trace elements of petroleum found in tap water from the Navy’s Hickam-area system as “fuel” and “jet fuel,” when, in fact, the source of the total petroleum hydrocarbon had not yet been identified. The editorial also stated that the Environmental Protection Agency has set an “action level” for contamination by petroleum elements; that level was set by the Hawaii Department of Health.
