On Monday morning Joint Task Force Red Hill, the military organization responsible for draining the tanks at the Navy’s underground Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, officially began the defueling process.

In a video released by JTF-RH on the military’s online Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, task force commander Vice Adm. John Wade was seen radioing his team at 9:01 a.m. to officially begin the operation.

“Good luck, let’s rock and roll,” he said into the radio.

It’s a long-awaited milestone more than a year after JTF-RH was stood up to extract the 104 million gallons of fuel from the tanks, which sit just 100 feet above an aquifer that most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water.

Commercial fuel tanker Empire State, which can hold 11 million gallons and is at Pearl Harbor docked at the Kilo Pier, will be the first ship to take fuel during the months-long defueling process. Several tankers will take the fuel from the facility to different locations around the Pacific.

The Honolulu Board of Water Supply warned for years that the World War II-era facility’s location over the aquifer posed a serious threat to Oahu’s water supply. Navy officials insisted the facility was safe and asserted that closing it down would hurt military readiness in the Pacific.

But in November 2021, jet fuel from the facility tainted the Navy’s Oahu water system, which served 93,000 people, including military families and civilians in former military housing areas. In March 2022 the Pentagon said that the tanks would be drained and the facility permanently closed.

The military also admitted that the aging World War II-era facility, as well as the pipelines that connect it to Joint Base Pearl Harbor- Hickam, had fallen into disrepair and required extensive fixes and upgrades to safely remove the fuel without risking further spills or threats to water supplies.

JTF-RH has spent the past year making those repairs and expects the defueling operations to end in late January. But the long-term shutdown and remediation of Red Hill is expected to take years.

Regulators from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Health are on-site monitoring the process.