The Navy has released its long-awaited investigation into the cause and events surrounding last year’s Red Hill fuel spills, which identifies a long list of operational and leadership failures, communication breakdowns and cavalier attitudes toward oversight of the underground fuel facility.
The investigation concluded that about 5,542 gallons of fuel ultimately escaped into the environment after a Nov. 20 pipeline rupture at the facility, a portion of which made its way to the Navy’s Red Hill well and the tap water of residents living in neighborhoods in and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
The report identified missed opportunities for preventing the drinking water contamination that trace back to a May 6, 2021 fuel spill. That fuel, which was sucked up into a fire suppression line that ruptured on Nov. 20, was the ultimate source of the drinking water contamination.
“These deficiencies endured due to seams in accountability and a failure to learn from prior incidents that falls unacceptably short of Navy standards for leadership, ownership and the safeguarding of our communities,” according to the report.
The report found alarming examples of Navy leaders failing to timely communicate information to the public and regulators.
For example, leaders at the scene of the Nov. 20 spill “failed to communicate the seriousness of the incident,” according to the report.
“Every person physically present at Red Hill on the evening of 20 November 2021 knew within a short time after arriving that the spill was all or mostly fuel,” the investigation found. “The fact that the spill was from a non-fuel system was undoubtedly confusing and led to initial reports of a water spill. However, those initial reports were never fully corrected.”
By midnight on Nov. 20, the commanding officer of Fleet Logistics Center Pearl Harbor and the commander and regional engineer for Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command knew the spill was primarily fuel and likely from the May 6,2021 spill, according to the report.
The commander of Fleet Logistics Center Pearl Harbor, who at the time was Capt. Albert Hornyak, also failed to report that the initial responder to the spill had gone to the hospital that evening due to chemical burns and that a second person had been injured.
The Navy also submitted its plan for defueling the Red Hill facility to the Hawaii Department of Health today, which was required under the state’s emergency order. Under the plan, the 20 underground fuel tanks will be drained by the end of 2024. Navy officials said that supply chain disruptions, as well as extensive pipeline and valve repairs that are needed before safely moving the fuel, prevents near-term defueling.
This morning, the Navy provided the media with a copy of the command investigation, but withheld its defueling plan. The command investigation was provided under the condition that its findings and comments by Navy leadership during a press conference, would not be published until Friday at 1 a.m.
DOH subsequently released both reports this afternoon, effectively breaking the embargo.
“We are releasing these documents in the interest of transparency,” DOH Deputy Director of Environmental Health Kathleen Ho said in a statement. “Red Hill needs to be shut down as quickly as possible and we fully expect that the Navy will marshal all possible available resources to defuel and decommission the facility. However, with the extensive repairs needed and the Navy’s history of spills from unsafe pipelines, our first priority continues to be ensuring that all defueling activities are performed safely for the sake of the people and environment of Hawai‘i.”
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