The Navy is doing a terrible job of protecting Hawaiian waters, at least from itself.
Unlike the fuel leak at Red Hill, the latest incident was hard to deny. It’s hard to hide a Navy surveillance and patrol jet after it skidded off the end of a runway and into Kaneohe Bay. It has been sitting atop a coral reef for more than a week.
It’s just another terrible incident in a pattern of pollution and obfuscation that the Navy can’t seem to break.
The Navy’s latest embarrassment coincided with stellar reporting from my Civil Beat colleague Christina Jedra. Her Nov. 20 story about text messages between Navy leadership discussing Red Hill “illustrated how the inept response to a May 6, 2021, leak at the facility laid the groundwork for another in November 2021 that sickened families.”
Like so many of us here in Hawaii, my ohana is intimately tied to the military. We want to be able to wholeheartedly support the individuals who serve with honor and distinction.
I would say that these two essential traits have been woefully lacking from the Navy.
The text messages were revealed as part of a lawsuit filed by families sickened by contaminated water. In January 2022, when the Honolulu Board of Water Supply sought answers from the Navy about water quality after the leaks from the Red Hill tanks, a former commander in charge of the Navy’s facilities in Hawaii texted a colleague that the “intent” of an email of data sent to BWS was to “inundate them with info already publicly available or provided to the Hawaii Department of Health.”
The next day, Jedra reported on the BWS seeking more than $1 billion in damages from the Navy to find a source to replace the aquifer under Red Hill that supplied water to 400,000 customers on Oahu, but is now irrevocably contaminated.
It took a week after the crash before a Navy admiral said he was “mindful that we need to do better in communicating with our neighbors here about our progress.” That was after U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda’s requests to “over-communicate about the situation in Kaneohe Bay. Especially, since the incident occurred “in her backyard.”
It is so frustrating to see people not learning the lesson of previous mistakes and, obviously, the Navy hasn’t learned from its earlier, and ongoing, pollution of our beloved waters.
Besides putting airplanes in the bay and jet fuel in the aquifer, the Navy regularly spills its sewage into Pearl Harbor. Hawaii’s Department of Health was unable to get the Navy to solve its discharge issues so officials had to turn to the Environmental Protection Agency for help. But even after the EPA ordered the Navy to fix the sewage troubles the regular contamination has persisted.
Pearl Harbor has been Peril Harbor for the people of Hawaii. That’s a cheap shot, but the Navy’s behavior in Hawaii merits it.
The Navy can’t get out of its own way.
Sadly, the fires in Maui and the Navy’s delaying tactics drew attention away from their malfeasance at Red Hill. Two years later, all of us in Hawaii should still be enraged at the Navy.
The Navy has an enormous footprint in Hawaii and it’s not an unreasonable expectation for it to be a stellar steward of lands and waters it controls. However, Hawaii has been suffering for far too long from its inability to care for our islands’ most precious treasures.
It’s time to help the Navy change its trajectory here in Hawaii.
I’ll write about a possible solution next week on the eve of the most solemn day in Pearl Harbor history.
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