Sierra Club calls for complete decommissioning of Red Hill fuel tanks
The environmental justice nonprofit says the Navy-EPA agreement to retrofit and monitor the historically leaky fuel tanks near Pearl Harbor is inadequate.
The Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi has expressed “extreme disappointment” in Governor Ige, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for agreeing to a inadequate settlement. The nonprofit says the agreement does not do nearly enough to protect Oʻahu’s drinking water from the massive, “historically leaky” fuel storage tanks beneath Red Hill.
“The Navy should not be allowed to take unacceptable risks like this with our water,” said Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi director Marti Townsend. “The tanks have already leaked, future leaks are foreseeable, and there is no way to treat leaks before contamination reaches our water. The only reasonable course of action is to retire the storage tanks.”
Townsend added, “Public safety dictates we take the most precautionary course of action.”
Hawaiʻi’s Commission on Water Resources, Honolulu’s Board of Water Supply, 18 state legislators and hundreds of residents have expressed serious concerns about the inadequacy of the Navy’s proposed agreement. Yet, according to the Sierra Club, the final agreement does not address those substantive concerns in a satisfactory way.
“It is misleading to say that these historic tanks comply with current state and federal requirements for underground storage tanks because these tanks are exempt from the most meaningful requirements, such as double-lining,” said Townsend.
The Sierra Club says its own research into the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility found that the 70-year-old tanks cannot be brought into compliance with current standards for underground storage.
“This means the Navy cannot ensure that fuel released from these tanks will be contained before it reaches the environment, ” said Townsend.
In addition, the Sierra Club found that there are no known methods for removing jet fuel from bedrock, the material that surrounds the tanks.
“The reality is that adding more monitoring wells around the tanks is, itself, a risk because drilling could fracture the bedrock, creating new cracks that would lead the fuel directly to our underground drinking water aquifer,” Townsend said. “There is no justification for exposing the people of Hawaiʻi to this kind of risk. The U.S. Navy and the industries that rely on these fuel reserves should immediately identify new storage arrangements that comply with today’s strict environmental standards and retire these historic tanks.”
The governor’s office and Navy did not return requests for comment.
