Red Hill Has Changed The Politics Around The Military In Hawaii … The military has enjoyed unwavering support from state and federal political leaders in Hawaii. But the threat to Oahu’s water supply may be bringing that to an end.
WASHINGTON — Jan. 13, 2014 was supposed to be a wake-up call.
On that day, a 27,000-gallon jet fuel leak from the Navy’s WWII-era underground storage facility at Red Hill threatened to contaminate Oahu’s aquifer, which sits just 100 feet below the tanks.
The initial reaction by state and local officials was swift.
The Honolulu Board of Water Supply shut down its wells in the area and immediately started testing for petroleum. The state Senate created a special task force to investigate what went wrong.
And by 2015 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Hawaii Department of Health had entered into a binding agreement with the Navy to find a permanent solution to a problem more than a generation in the making.
Now, nearly eight years later, officials are reacting to a crisis they should have seen coming, yet questions remain about whether they’ve done enough to prepare.
