Underneath the athletic fields and parking lots around Radford High School and Makalapa Elementary School, long forgotten toxic debris buried and left behind by the U.S. military has been holding up a series of long-needed renovations and repairs.

The schools were built over a parcel of land the Navy used during World War II as a salvage yard and waste dump, leaving behind heavy metals and toxins in the soil that today make excavation hazardous for workers. Some state officials are also concerned about the possibility of unexploded ordnance, or UXO, buried in the ground below as well.

The dump was rediscovered in 2013 as Radford began renovations around its running track. It has now fallen to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to determine the scope of contamination, how to tackle it and to ultimately clean the area.

A USACE team has been digging through thousands of pages of archival documents and taking soil samples, and has produced thousands of pages worth of data on its findings. The agency says coming up with a viable cleanup plan will take time. But after more than a decade, staff at the school are beginning to lose patience.

Sinkholes have developed around Radford’s grounds that Principal James Sunday says currently can’t be fixed due to concerns about toxins or potential bombs buried in the soil. A wide range of projects are indefinitely on hold.

“We’re a school, we want to get projects done,” Sunday said. “We can’t do anything with our practice fields now, we can’t even dig down to fix our sprinkler heads, we can’t change the plumbing … we can’t touch the portables that are over 50 years old (and need to be) replaced. We can’t schedule any projects in that area.”

Lt. Cmdr. Matty Haith, an engineer from the U.S. Public Health Service who serves as USACE’s project manager for the cleanup, said he understands the frustration. “It’s always hard to go before stakeholders and say, ‘Hey, it’s gonna be a few years until we’ve characterized this risk properly and developed what that solution is going to be,’” he said.

Haith stresses that his team is hard at work. USACE held a meeting at Radford High on May 23 to present preliminary results of soil sampling done over spring break, and a final report on its remedial investigation is expected in October. But there’s currently no guaranteed timeline on when the actual cleanup and remediation will actually start, let alone finish.

“I just think there needs to be a sense of urgency to get this done and not a meeting every three months to go over some soil sampling and then saying we’re waiting for the next round of testing,” Sunday said. “Someone has to kickstart this thing. We need to start talking about how to fix the area once and for all to make it safe.”

Frustrations escalate

The Navy said in a statement that it is currently supporting the remediation effort by “providing historical data from the remediation work conducted under the (Navy’s restoration) program.”

The state Department of Education said in a separate statement that “the health and safety of our students, staff and schools is the Department’s top priority and we continue to work in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the state Department of Health to resolve this matter. Plans to manage environmental hazards at the school, which include requirements and methods to safely conduct routine maintenance and construction, remain in place.”

But emails obtained by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reveal deep frustration among state officials and workers with the pace of the effort and with the current state of the school’s facilities.

On Dec. 18, a project coordinator at DOE wrote that he held off on a contract to repave the girls’ athletic locker room at Radford High, saying that “due to the paved areas being located in the former Navy dump zone which contains hazardous material (and possible UXO), we are not able to disturb the subgrade below the base course.”

“The existing pavement is so badly deteriorated that it needs to be completely reconstructed,” the project coordinator continued. “Unfortunately, due to possible hazardous materials in the subgrade below the pavement, we are not able to properly repair the pavement directly in front of the gym without obtaining significant additional funding in order to mitigate the hazardous materials (which the Navy should pay for).”

In an email sent Dec. 28, Gary Bignami, the Environmental Services Unit manager for the state Department of Education, told both Sunday and Radford athletic director Kelly Sur that “I’d like to see this site remediated in my lifetime, but I’m not confident it will. USACE seems to be slow rolling this. Their next step is a soil gas investigation; drilling a couple holes in the gym and tennis courts. When they actually implement remedial actions is not clear to me.”

On June 18, Sur sent an email to Haith telling him, “There is a sinkhole evolving near our ewa goalpost on the upper field … I will send the video … this needs to be corrected ASAP.”

Haith responded, telling Sur: “I will take note of the issue; however, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) does not have the authority to address maintenance issues with the facility. USACE’s statutory authority is related to remediation of the site, which could involve addressing subsurface compaction issues during the remediation. However, until the feasibility study is complete and proposed plan adopted and remediation begins, there is little I can do to assist with your problem.”

Buried history

During the early 20th century, the Makalapa Crater was used for agriculture. But by the 1930s, the Navy acquired just over 19 acres that it began using to deposit dredging debris as the Navy built up around Pearl Harbor.

Then, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

“(The U.S. military) immediately needed somewhere in order to have a scrapyard as they were doing the cleanup from the Dec. 7 attack,” Haith said. “And then it continued to be used throughout the duration of the war as a salvage yard and also a burning dump and solid waste landfill.”

Throughout the war, the site housed heavy metal and scrap salvage from ships damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack. Burnable waste was taken to an open burn area, while glass, metal, asbestos, concrete and other debris also were discarded at the site.

According to a USACE document reviewed by the Star-Advertiser, it’s believed that at one point about 1,000 truckloads of waste material per day were delivered to the site.

During the 1950s, the Navy handed the land over to Hawaii’s territorial government. Radford High was established in 1957, and its first senior class graduated in June 1960. Over the years, the site’s history as a naval scrapyard and waste dump was largely forgotten.

But on Dec. 19, 2013, workers found buried debris while excavating soil around the school’s running track.

“When they dug into the ground, the contractors noticed discolored earth and soil, and also started finding metal parts and cables and other things,” Sunday said. “Then they discovered some potential ordnance.”

Between 2014 and 2015, DOE identified asbestos debris in the soil around Radford’s track. Deeper samples found lead, mercury and dioxins above the environmental action limit. The Navy took on the initial work and excavated 14,300 cubic yards of soil.

“The Navy went down and remediated our whole football field and fixed everything down there because they identified a hazard and then moved quick,” Sunday said.

After the Navy finished with the field, it handed operations to USACE under the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, better known as CERCLA. The Army engineers began researching the entire site in 2018, going through records and testing the soil.

Sunday said that since then “there’s been zero movement besides discussion at a table on how we’re going to fix this, and they’re still talking about testing.”

But Haith said USACE has been hard at work studying the area to come up with a plan, and that there’s a wide range of factors involved.

“Sometimes this process can be that you get to the end of the remedial investigation, and it’s like, ‘Wait a second, you know, we found this, we really need to go back and we need to do this,’ and that’s what happened with this remedial investigation,” Haith said, explaining that various test results and findings required additional testing and research.

“It can take many years if you look at other CERCLA projects because it’s important to characterize what waste is there and what is the proper method of cleaning it up, so that you don’t go back and have to redo things again,” he said.

“Some of these steps take quite a long time. There’s a lot of data to review. The last remedial investigation report was 10,000 pages. And so this supplement is going to be somewhat comparable to that effort.”

Safety concerns

One particular area USACE has studied is the possibility of live explosive munitions under the soil around the two schools. Haith said that so far surveys have found “no confirmed conditions or explosives of concern from this action. Over 800 pieces of material … were found, but they were all not considered explosive hazards.”

USACE officials say they have found shrapnel and other pieces of spent explosives and ammunition but so far no evidence of actual live munitions beneath the schools.

“We like to be very careful on how we classify this. Munitions debris, covers, cartridges, cases, tubes is not necessarily explosive in nature,” Haith said. “This was not a place where the Navy disposed of live munitions — we know that from the records. Did they dispose of munitions debris? Yeah, that’s quite apparent.”

Steven Jones, an ordnance and explosives safety specialist with USACE who has worked on the project, supported Haith’s comments.

“I think what’s important is that even though (finding debris) is expected, all of the history, the historical documents we found relating to the original use of the site, everything leads us to believe there’s not munitions there,” he said.

During their research, USACE investigators going through records found a letter of admonishment issued by a Navy official after a unit disposed of machine gun rounds at the site. Haith said that “from our research, we see a letter like that … that means someone trying to set people straight, people were checking whether live rounds were being put in there, and then people were then trying to reiterate, ‘No, do not put that there.’”

However, USACE officials say that while it’s not likely, they can’t rule out the possibility there could be explosives anywhere in the area.

According to Jones, “We didn’t say no probability, we just say low probability, we don’t expect it, we don’t think we’ll encounter it. But we are making people aware of it and we’re committing to … safety, to mitigate any of that minor risk that may still be there.”

State officials have taken note. In a Dec. 28 email, Bignami wrote to a contractor that when it comes to fixing pavement around Radford, “the main risk is the low probability of impacting unexploded ordnance. High risk, low probability.”

Ultimately, USACE officials say the contamination and debris are underground and don’t pose an immediate threat to students or workers unless they’re actively being dug up. They argue that for the time being, as long as construction and other activities aren’t taking place, the school and surrounding area are safe.

“So you can also see how this is not necessarily time-­critical when we develop a remedial action, which is why we’re trying to properly take the time to characterize the risk and the remediation needed,” Haith said.

But the Radford High principal said he and his staff are fed up with waiting, saying “it was identified 11 years ago and here we are in 2024, still talking about testing … . This is not an abandoned industrial area, it’s a school.”

In addition to the delays on upgrades and repairs to aging school facilities, Sunday said he believes that more sinkholes are forming under the school grounds as pieces of metal scrap and other debris rust and rot away underground, and that it will continue to get worse while campus facilities age and fall into disrepair.

“At what point do we just do a once-and-for-all fix, knowing that it’s contaminated?” Sunday said. “At what point would (the federal government) take responsibility and say, ‘You know, we don’t need to test anymore, we’ve identified the entire area as a dumpsite, we’re going to fix it.’”