Last week, the Honolulu Civil Beat received photos and video showing the immediate aftermath of the fuel leak that led to the shuttering of multiple wells on Oahu, an ongoing water crisis, and—finally—a promise from the Navy that its Red Hill fuel tanks sitting just 100 feet above a critical aquifer would finally be defueled. The alarming footage appears to confirm a Navy investigation surrounding the leak, which sent around 20,000 gallons of fuel into an area of the Red Hill storage facility that soon flooded with a mixture of fuel and water. No one can be seen in the footage and the Honolulu Civil Beat suggests that the worker who broke the PVC pipe in the facility was the person filming the incident.
Concerned citizens, environmental activists, and lawmakers have been angling to get a better picture of what transpired on Nov. 20, 2021. The footage’s existence was itself a surprise given the fact that the Navy previously claimed to Rep. Kai Kahele that security cameras in the facility were disconnected and rendered “unusable.” It’s unclear if any other workers took photos or recorded videos of the scene but that certainly hasn’t concerned the Navy. Officials recently told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the Navy was looking into “accountability actions” over the leaked footage but that the person who sent them to the Honolulu Civil Beat likely won’t face any disciplinary action.
Environmental groups consider the footage a further indictment of the Navy’s inaction and generally poor response to the ongoing crisis, which was caused by multiple human errors. “For them to assure people at the time the water was safe is so irresponsible and maddening,” Sierra Club of Hawaii Executive Director Wayne Tanaka told the Honolulu Civil Beat. “The people who were there, the people in charge, that didn’t speak up, they need to beg for forgiveness. It’s so obvious what the danger was and how much fuel was hemorrhaging into that tunnel.”