HONOLULU — The Honolulu City Council is considering a resolution that calls on the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Navy to start weekly testing of the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility’s monitoring wells and shaft for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
Resolution 23-70, introduced on Monday by council members Radiant Cordero and Val Okimoto, would also urge the DoD to release information relating to PFAS and water testing at the facility requested by the Honolulu Board of Water Supply in a January letter.
The resolution is related to a Nov. 29, 2022, incident in which approximately 1,300 of aqueous film forming foam leaked from a fire-suppression system at the facility and spilled into the surround natural environment, potentially releasing PFAS into the groundwater.
The resolution also cites numerous other resolutions enacted in response to previous fuel and chemical spills at Red Hill dating back to 2014.
The request for weekly PFAS testing was included in the Jan. 10 letter from BWS manager and chief engineer Ernie Lau to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which criticized DOD for a lack of transparency in its handling of the water-contamination crisis and subsequent testing and cleanup efforts.
In the letter Lau requested that DoD provide copies of all PFAS testing results; disclosure of all past use of aqueous film forming foam; any information regarding whether the facility had complete containment, capture and disclosure mechanisms to prevent release of AFFF; all sampling and monitoring plans and results for all testing related to the Nov. 29, 2022 AFFF release; videos of the AFFF release and cleanup; all groundwater sampling data since 2016 that indicates the presence of PFAS; and all groundwater sampling data collected at any former or current DoD installation on Oahu.
The DoD did not respond specifically to the Jan. 10 letter, but the Navy did send Lau a letter a week later in response to two previous messages requesting data from water testing at Red Hill.
“As previously discussed, the Navy continues to post all of the results from our sampling efforts on our website jbphh-safewaters.org,” the letter read. “We will not provide direct access to our databases or any data in a format beyond what is publicly available on our website.
“The Hawaii State Department of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency have complete access to all data and reports associated with our remediation and recovery efforts at Red Hill, including all data associated with the Aqueous Film Forming Foam release at Adit 6,” the letter continued. “We will continue to work with our regulators and all data, including the results from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances sampling in the soil and groundwater, will be posted to our website when received.”
As the resolution states, “the Navy’s apparent inability or unwillingness to implement testing and provide the information requested by the BWS is of grave concern and potentially places at risk Oahu’s drinking water resources, because the BWS needs accurate and timely information in order to allow it to address potential threats to those precious resources.”
Besides the call for weekly testing and the release of requested information, the resolution more generally calls for all branches of the military “to act in accordance with the Department of Defense’s policies regarding PFAS testing and AFFF releases, address transparently the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility’s potential threat to Oahu’s drinking water supply and provide in a timely fashion all relevant information to all stakeholders and the community.”
Michael Tsai covers local and state politics for Spectrum News Hawaii.
