Down to the wire and on the June 30 deadline for the military to release its defueling plan, the Defense Department presented a 20-page document to the Hawaii Health Department detailing how it plans to shutter the Red Hill military fuel storage facility. Also on that Thursday, the Hawaii Health Department released the Navy’s comprehensive investigation into what went wrong at the facility. The Navy’s summarization—especially as it relates to the final crisis that led to orders for Red Hill’s shuttering—is damning: “This water contamination resulted from a series of cascading failures, and those failures were preventable. They were due to both individual errors and systemic problems. Although the Navy is proficient at conducting technically complex, high-consequence operations at sea, many of those processes were not applied at Red Hill.”
In page after page of the Navy’s assessment, the failures mount. Past failures, like a prior spill in May, contributed to the fuel leak last November—itself a product of, per the Navy, “the Red Hill rover inadvertently [striking] a fire suppression system retention line drain valve with the passenger cart of a train, cracking the PVC pipe.” Multiple workers were injured responding to the leak, with some receiving minor chemical burns and experiencing skin irritation. The smell of fuel was pungent and the mixture of fuel and water blasting forth from the pipe with such intensity made it difficult to contain—not that the Navy activated a response plan to begin with that day. Even if the Navy had done more than just refer to its response plan, the plan itself failed to account for the Red Hill well the fuel ultimately leaked into on Nov. 20, 2021.
It took until Dec. 9 for officials to confirm fuel had indeed leaked from the cracked PVC pipe and all senior leaders were essentially left in the dark about that possibility until well after the fact. Needless to say, none of this has inspired confidence in the military to clean up its own mess. The investigation into the water crisis has led to probes being launched at 57 facilities across the planet. Some service members or workers who were found to be at fault in this situation will be facing disciplinary action, according to the Navy, but it’s unclear what that entails. It could also be quite some time before a defueling plan is truly finalized. The Defense Department acknowledged that its plan won’t receive the necessary Hawaii Health Department approval it needs until it gives the agency “an updated plan incorporating all relevant supplemental information and providing fidelity on its milestones and overall timelines,” and boy will that goal take some time to meet.
Much work must be done at Red Hill, even before the Navy can begin to remove the millions of gallons of fuel its 20 tanks store underground. Pipelines must be repaired, lines must be unpacked, and personnel must be properly trained and educated on best practices to ensure that even more disasters aren’t in the Navy’s future. Up until the November leak, the military apparently aware of how a spill like this could happen in the first place. Per the Navy’s investigation, personnel “had not anticipated a fuel spill in this area of the Red Hill tunnel system and were unaware of multiple pathways to the environment and aquifer from the area. Nevertheless, this knowledge gap is surprising and concerning given persistent scrutiny on the environmental risks associated with a major fuel spill at Red Hill.”