Fix It Up or Shut It Down
Call for Urgent Action to Protect Oʻahu's Primary Aquifer from Red Hill Fuel Storage Contamination
In January 2014, the U.S. Navy reported that 27,000 gallons of jet fuel leaked from a tank at its Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility. This facility holds twenty fuel storage tanks and is located a mere 100 feet above Oʻahu's primary aquifer that serves residents from Moanalua to Hawaiʻi Kai.
Previous studies have shown this is not the first leak from this facility and the groundwater beneath the tanks may already be contaminated with fuel. We are concerned these tanks will continue to leak, posing a serious threat to the future of Oʻahu's drinking water.
Despite these leaks and impending threats, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have released no plans for cleaning up the leaked fuel and offered no assurance that future leaks will not occur. The EPA's current plan only calls for the monitoring and renovating of these outdated tanks.
We are calling on the Hawaiʻi Department of Health, EPA, and U.S. Navy to:
- Install sufficient "sentinel" monitoring wells to guard public drinking water sources from possible contamination currently in the aquifer,
- Locate the fuel that has already leaked from the storage facility and clean it up,
- Install genuine leak prevention systems, not only leak detection systems, that will guarantee there will be no future leaks from this facility.
If these expectations cannot be met, then the obsolete fuel storage tanks at Red Hill should be retired, and the stored fuel relocated to modern and unhazardous facilities that comply with today's strict environmental standards.
