Two years after a fuel leak at a Navy storage complex contaminated drinking water at Pearl Harbor, the city of Honolulu is guarding against contamination to its own water supply.
For decades at Pearl Harbor, an underground facility called Red Hill stored millions of gallons of fuel for the U.S. military. Red Hill, which was quickly built ahead of the United States’ involvement in World War II, has recorded at least 73 fuel leaks since 1943 , the Sierra Club told Honolulu’s Civil Beat. Those leaks resulted in some 180,000 gallons of leaked fuel over the years, a number the Navy has disputed, according to the Civil Beat.
During the facility’s most recent leak in November 2021, a cracked pipe leaked thousands of gallons of jet fuel into the drinking water on the base at Pear Harbor. Another leak in 2014 released up to 27,000 gallons of fuel.
The massive tanks at Red Hill have the capacity to store 250 million gallons of jet fuel and marine diesel. They’re now empty, but those tanks were built into Hawaii’s porous volcanic rock, and no one knows if jet fuel may still be trapped within that rock. That’s a potential problem — not just for Pearl Harbor, but also for neighboring Honolulu, whose primary water supply is 100 feet below the Navy complex.