More than three years after the Navy shut down two of its Oahu water wells in response to the Red Hill water crisis, the service is now looking to reopen them.
The state Department of Health has given the Navy “conditional approval” to work toward reopening its Aiea-Halawa Shaft. The Navy also has released a draft environmental impact statement on the possibility of building water treatment facilities that eventually would allow it to reactivate its fuel-contaminated Red Hill Shaft, and is soliciting public feedback until Sunday.
The Navy is in the process of permanently shutting down the Red Hill facility, which sits just 100 feet above an aquifer most of Honolulu relies on for water.
In 2021, fuel from the facility tainted the Red Hill Shaft and entered the Navy’s Oahu water system that serves 93,000 people, including military families and civilians living in former military housing areas. Thousands of people on the Navy water line reported experiencing ailments ranging from rashes, digestive issues, neurological problems and others.
Representatives of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative have raised concerns about the reactivation plans — including the degree to which residents on the water line are being informed of plans to reactivate the wells.
The Red Hill CRI is an elected board formed as part of a federal consent decree regarding the closure of the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility whose membership includes residents affected by the contamination and local community members. On Tuesday, Mandy Feindt — a CRI member whose family lived on Ford Island and reported severe symptoms — joined a roundtable event in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill with several veterans discussing the federal government’s response to military toxic exposures.
Feindt told lawmakers “this has been going on for a long time, and there’s not been a lot of lessons learned.”
On May 6, 2021, jet fuel from the Red Hill tanks spilled and some of it entered a drain that was part of the facility’s fire suppression line. It sat there until Nov. 20, 2021, when a worker near the Red Hill water well — which is inside the fuel facility as well — accidentally ruptured the line, spilling the fuel into a tunnel. Navy officers at the facility did not report the spill to regulators or the public — or that the worker had been hospitalized — and hoped that they had contained it.
But fuel had entered the well and was being pumped into the water system. Within a week, residents began complaining about fuel and chemical odors. On Nov. 28, 2021, the Navy shut down the Red Hill as complaints rolled in, but still did not tell the public. The DOH put out an advisory for the water system, but Navy officials insisted publicly that the water was safe and asked the DOH to rescind the advisory. On Dec. 2, 2021, the Navy acknowledged that its waterline was tainted and also went on to shut down its Aiea-Halawa Shaft after finding traces of contamination.
Ever since, the Navy has depended entirely on its Waiawa Shaft for water as the only source for its water line — something the DOH has warned likely isn’t safe.
But as DOH and Navy move forward, representatives of both the BWS and CRI have expressed concern about how and when information gets released. The DOH granted the Navy conditional approval to pursue reactivating its Aiea- Halawa Shaft in a February letter, but didn’t tell the CRI until March and did not put out a media release.
“I’m very concerned that the Department of Health hasn’t let anyone know,” CRI member Ilima DeCosta said at the group’s March meeting. “So even if the Navy is not going to let it be known, I’m concerned that the Department of Health is not letting customers know.”
Joyce Lin, a BWS engineer who attended the meeting, said that while it was sensible that the DOH and Navy want to make sure the system isn’t dependent on just the Waiawa Shaft, “they should really inform their customers about turning their water back on, specifically from Aiea-Halawa Shaft.”
In a statement to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the DOH said that “while state law does not require such an announcement, the Department of Health strongly encourages the Navy to share this information with the public.”
In an email, Navy Closure Task Force Red Hill told the Star-Advertiser that the task force is working closely with DOH to begin the reactivation process and that it received conditional approval from the regulator on Feb. 10. and that throughout April “as part of this conditional approval, NCTF-RH will be undergoing a pilot study of the Granular Activated Carbon treatment system at this site to collect valuable data that will demonstrate the effectiveness of the treatment system.”
The task force also pledged in its statement that the public would be informed before the Aiea-Halawa Shaft is reconnected to the Navy’s drinking water system.
12 conditions needed
DOH said in its statement that it had completed a forensic investigation of “low-level concentrations total petroleum hydrocarbons” in 2024, including intermittent detections at Navy Aiea-Halawa Shaft, and found that “no fuel compounds were associated with the detections.”
“TPH testing can indicate the presence of petroleum- related substances, but they’re not always directly linked to fuel,” the DOH stated. “In this case, the forensic testing was found to be a result of naturally occurring organic compounds in soil or water (like plant resins or humic substances), which can mimic petroleum hydrocarbons in test results.”
But the DOH’s conditional approval still requires the Navy to meet 12 conditions before its Aiea-Halawa Shaft can be reactivated as a drinking water source. Among them, the Navy has to report on the effectiveness of sampling results and of efforts to remove Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, contaminants known as “forever chemicals” that have been associated with firefighting foam the military uses to put out fuel fires.
The DOH also will require the Navy to report any conditions that could contaminate the well within 24 hours and the Navy must provide at least 10 days’ notice to DOH of any plans to reactivate it. But the BWS is still concerned about it calls troubling unknowns.
“There is concern from the Board of Water Supply in terms of uncertainty on the impacts of the underground water flow, because (the Navy’s) Aiea-Halawa Shaft is to the west of our Board of Water Supply Halawa Shaft (and) the Red Hill Shaft is actually east of our Halawa Shaft,” Lin said during the March CRI meeting. “So in a sense, our Board of Water Supply Halawa Shaft is kind of sandwiched between the two sources. So turning on at Aiea-Halawa Shaft, would it draw contaminants across the valley from the Red Hill Shaft all the way over to Aiea-Halawa Shaft? We’re not sure.”
Lin said that she talked to DOH and Navy officials at a recent Red Hill open house who told her they thought that was unlikely, but Lin also told the CRI that she was worried the prospect wasn’t ruled out entirely. When asked by the CRI to categorize her concern on a scale of 1 to 10, she replied “I would say I’m pretty concerned close to 10, if not 10, just because there’s so much uncertainty.”
In its statement to the Star-Advertiser, the DOH insisted that “the Navy’s groundwater flow model that referenced BWS is flawed. The model has since been retracted by the Navy and has never been accepted by regulatory agencies. While work on a revised groundwater flow model remains ongoing, there appear to be several factors that would naturally or by design prevent water from the vicinity of the Red Hill Shaft.”
The DOH argued that when the Aiea-Halawa Shaft is in operation “it pulls in saltier water, not fresher water from the Red Hill region,” that rock formations in the area that “intrude into the water table form a barrier between the Navy Aiea-Halawa Shaft and the Red Hill region,” and that “a draw from the Bulk Fuel facility in the makai direction would pass through Red Hill Shaft where a capture zone through pump and treatment would intercept the contaminant.”
The DOH also said that both the Navy and BWS continue to install groundwater monitoring wells between Red Hill and the Navy’s Aiea-Halawa Shaft and that “the monitoring well network will continue to be regularly tested for indications of contaminant migration — which have not been observed thus far.”
Interim facility
More ambitious, but likely much further off, is the Navy’s plan to put its Red Hill Shaft back into service. Gallons of jet fuel poured into the shaft and Navy divers sent into the well itself reported encountering heavy contamination. The Navy has been using large granular activated carbon — or GAC — filters to remove contaminated water and dump it into the the nearby Halawa stream for years.
The Navy has said that the water it has discharged is safe for the environment, but it has been unable to find a way to purify the well itself. The draft environmental assessment says that the plan is “to construct and operate a new water treatment facility to reconnect water from the Navy’s Red Hill Shaft to the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (JBPHH) drinking water system and discontinue the discharge of water into Halawa Stream.”
The plan calls for an interim treatment facility, which would filter the water using GAC and is already under construction and expected to be completed in 2026 according to the Navy’s draft environmental assessment. No timeline was given for the completion of a permanent water treatment plant.
The military is required by the National Environmental Policy Act to conduct an environmental assessment for any major project and to solicit public feedback. If the assessment that determines a project has the potential to significantly impact communities, it then has to craft a formal Environmental Impact Statement laying out those potential impacts and submit to another round of community comments and feedback.
Last year the EPA slapped the Navy and the Defense Logistics Agency with a $5,000 a fine for violating the federal consent order for not attending the CRI’s public December meeting. The military is required to show up at least once a quarter.
But more recently the EPA agreed to rescind the fine if the military agreed to come back to the table with the CRI. The CRI has criticized the decision, asserting that the small fine was mostly symbolic and that rescinding it symbolically absolves military officials who knowingly violated the consent decree.
In March the Trump administration’s new EPA’s Administrator, Lee Zeldin, toured the Red Hill facility and met with both Navy and DOH officials as part of a trip to Hawaii that also included a stop on Maui to discuss cleanup efforts in Lahaina after the deadly 2023 fire that destroyed the town. U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, told the Star-Advertiser that she sees Zeldin’s visit to Red Hill and meetings with DOH as a positive step.
“As we change administration I think it’s important that we not lose ground, and we understand that this is not just about draining out the fuel,” Tokuda said. “This is about everything that is required, to make sure that we are continuously monitoring with fidelity and that we’re treating and remediating the way the public expects us to.”
The Trump administration has vowed to roll back environmental regulations and projects, with the EPA announcing significant cuts. Meanwhile Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has promised to shut down as many military environmental programs as possible, arguing they have distracted the military from its warfighting mission. That has led some in Hawaii to wonder what that could mean for Red Hill cleanup and environmental standards.
“Here in Congress that there is both awareness, concern and commitment when it comes to Red Hill — this is a bipartisan commitment,” Tokuda said. “In order to ensure readiness, we need to make sure that we are literally not poisoning our service members water, right? Service members and their families were sickened by this.”
