Hundreds of thousands of acres in Hawai’i have been, at one time or another, under the control of the armed forces in Hawai’i. That much is known. What is not so well known is what the military has done with that land. Or, to put it another way, has past use of the land rendered it unfit for any future use, even when the military has no further need of it?
The question is especially pertinent inasmuch as pressures of growth make it likely that lands formerly controlled by the military will be targeted for development. In fact, this has already begun to occur, with predictable consequences. Land that the Navy wanted to turn over to the state or the City and County of Honolulu for use as possible low-cost housing (in the Manana area) turned out to be contaminated by chemicals the Navy had stored on the site over they years. Effecting the proposed simple exchange of city land for Navy land has taken years and is still not completed. (For a fuller discussion of contaminated Navy lands, readers may wish to review the December 1991edition of Environment Hawai’i.)
But even if a given military site is itself not considered for development, the question as to what was done on it is appropriate. More and more, environmental scientists realize that pollution cannot be confined to the scene of the crime. Plumes of chemicals moving underground can contaminate water supplies off-site. Ordnance shot into the high reaches of mountains can be washed downstream. Soil loss and erosion in the mauka lands can harm streams and foul bays with siltation. The potential consequences are infinite.
Hundreds of Sites…
Since 1984, the Defense Environmental Restoration Program has been in place. It is intended to address contamination at both existing defense installations (the part of the program called installation restoration, or IR) and formerly used defense sites – or FUDS. The program extends to cleaning up contamination associated with past Defense Department activities, even when that contamination lies outside the boundaries of the property under military control. Charged with administering the FUDS program is the Army Corps of Engineers. Responsibility for clean-up at existing installations falls to the services using them.
The Department of Defense is required to provide Congress with an annual report on progress in meeting the goals of DERP including lists of existing installations where contamination has been identified; FUDS are not included. The DERP report for fiscal 1990 (delivered to Congress in February 1991) identifies 235 contaminated sites at 46 separate installations in the Hawai’i area. (Johnston Island is included as an Hawai’i installation. It is said to have five contaminated sites.) Waikane Valley Impact Area – not technically yet a FUDS – shows up as a Navy installation, with one contaminated site listed. (Installations can be as large as Schofield Barracks, with 19 sites. Pearl Harbor turns up in the report as at least nine separate installations – for example, the shipyard, the submarine base, the Public Works Center, etc. The total number of contaminated sites is placed at 40 for those nine installations.)
The DERP report also gives the status of clean-up operations at each contaminated installation. For all the 235 sites identified, preliminary assessments were completed or in progress at the time of the report. (In fact, this is almost a tautology: Only after a preliminary assessment is done does a facility make it onto the list of contaminated sites.)
The next step in cleaning up contaminated sites is preparation of a site investigation report. A total of 156 of the 235 sites have made it to this stage.
When it comes to the preparation of what is called a Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study (RIIFS, where the actual method of clean-up is discussed), the Defense Department can point to just six sites where this has been done. A Remedial Design has been prepared for exactly one.
And of the total 235 sites identified as contaminated, exactly one had been cleaned up at the time of the 1990 report (the most recent available).
And More to Come?
It goes almost without saying that the list of contaminated sites is probably incomplete. Every year that the Pentagon has prepared a DERP report, the number of contaminated sites grows, at a pace that has been almost exponential. This is described by Seth Shulman in his book, The Threat at Home:
“The report of fiscal year 1988 … listed 8,139 potentially contaminated sites at 897 installations. The report contained roughly 100 pages. The following year [the report]… documented 14,401 potentially contaminated sites at 1,579 installations. That year’s volume came to about 150 pages.
“The latest report, covering fiscal year 1990, runs about 250 pages. The military now says it has some 17,482 potentially contaminated sites at 1,855 installations.”1
As Shulman notes, these figures do not include formerly used defense sites, nor do they represent contamination at U.S. military installations not on U.S. soil.
Helene Takemoto of the Honolulu office of the Army Corps of Engineers stated that Corps now has cleaned up a total of three sites in Hawai’i: underground fuel storage tanks were pulled out at Ka’ena Point and Pohakuloa. At South Point, a fuel tank was removed and a cover was placed over a 30-foot-deep cesspool. No list of contaminated FUDS in Hawai’i was available, Takemoto stated, citing computer problems on the Mainland. Moreover, the list of FUDS generated by the Honolulu office of the Corps of Engineers was an “internal document,” she said.
In any event, any inventory generated by the military will probably not be complete. That this should be so may be traced generally to the Defense Department’s overall lackadaisical approach to record-keeping, particularly when wartime exigencies forced all other considerations to take a back seat.
The number of sites used by the military during World War II and since is large indeed, as the accompanying map shows.2 There is no way of knowing precisely what hazards are present at each of these sites. Unexploded ordnance is but one of many different types of contamination that may make land unfit for some, if not all, human activities. Other sites may be damaged by improper disposal of hazardous wastes, by careless use of cleaning agents or pesticides, or by leaking petroleum pipelines and fuel storage tanks. By some accounts, chemical weapons (including nerve gas) dating back to World War II may still be stored on O’ahu.
Ordnance and Explosive Waste
When asked if the Corps of Engineers had tackled any sites involving ordnance or what the Pentagon calls OEW, for ordnance and explosive waste – Takemoto said it had not. Sites with ordnance are last on the Corps’ list of cleanup priorities, she said. In a line before that are sites with hazardous and toxic waste and those with unsafe debris that poses an immediate threat to public safety or health.
Over the years, unexploded ordnance has posed lust such a threat, however. In the two decades following World War II, the state’s newspapers carried regular accounts of people being injured by grenades or shells of various types. At least 11 civilian deaths – most of them children – have been attributed to World War II “duds.”
In the years immediately following the war, the armed forces conducted sweeps of land where ordnance had been used. No one claimed then or claims now that those clearing operations gathered up all the unexploded bombs, grenades, shells or mortar rounds that littered the islands following the departure of most troops stationed here during the war.
In September 1946, for example, The Honolulu Advertiser reported that bomb disposal squads conducted “an almost superhuman effort to rid the [Windward O’ahu] shore and ocean bottom of missiles which were fired during wartime practice games.” The sweep extended from Koko Head to Kahuku.
“Because an area is completely cleared of duds one day does not mean that the same area will be free of such danger a day, week, or even a year later,” the newspaper reported. Currents, tides, and even a 1946 tsunami were blamed for bringing to the surface ordnance hidden during previous sweeps. That particular clearing operation was prompted by a dud exploding on Rabbit Island two months earlier, which killed one boy and injured four fishing companions.
The unreliability of ordnance sweeps was underscored a decade later, when a ranch hand at Parker Ranch on the Big Island was killed by an exploding dud The death occurred after 91,000 acres of land at Waikoloa, most of it owned by Parker Ranch, had been the subject of one of the largest “de-dudding” operations in the military’s history. The Marines had used the land as a training area during World War II and conducted the sweep prior to returning it to the use of Parker Ranch. The heirs of the killed ranch hand sued the United States, but lost. Parker Ranch had known of ongoing discovery of ordnance, it was determined at trial, but had not let the U.S. know of this. For that reason, the United States was absolved of culpability in the death.
What Now?
Waikane Valley was used as a military training area from 1942 to the early 1960s. Only now is the matter of its future utility coming to a head, with a trial over the government’s proposal to condemn the property scheduled for late September of this year.
Among the many questions raised by the Waikane Valley condemnation case is this: Is the usefulness of other land – apart from the well known problems of Kaho’olawe – likely to be similarly affected by the problem of unexploded ordnance?
Any discussion of land use should bear in mind that as development pressures grow, land values increase and so, too, does the determination to encroach on land that had in the past been deemed too difficult to permit of settlement. Thus, areas that no thinking person would have considered potential growth targets two decades ago now sprout million-dollar houses with commanding views.
As the accompanying map shows, hardly any valley was untouched by the military during World War II. Like the Kamaka property in Waikane Valley, much of the land used for training was – and remains – in private ownership. Much of the Kawailoa and virtually all of the Kahuku training areas are privately owned – by Bishop Estate and Campbell Estate- respectively.
The mere fact of military use does not suggest the presence – then or now – of explosives. However, nearly all training areas had associated “training aids” that entailed the use of explosives. Examples include grenade courts, mortar ranges, anti-aircraft target ranges, and artillery impact areas. Coastal areas used for amphibious landing training might include impact areas for the firing of mortars and large-caliber artillery from the sea inland.3
Nearly all off-shore islands were used as bombing ranges. On June 24, 1948, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported on a warning from Col. James L. Guion, the Army’s officer in charge of ordnance service. “Vacation time is danger time for anyone who ventures into dud-filled ranges,” the colonel was quoted as saying. Rabbit Island and Kaho’olawe were both “kapu,” the paper stated. Areas that had been used but cleared could be entered “with caution,” according to Guion. Those areas included Kawailoa range, “Ft. Hase range (Ulupao peninsula, now occupied by the Kane’ohe Marine Corps Air Station); Ioleka’a Valley (above the State Hospital in Kane’ohe); Marconi impact area (above Koko Head and Makapu’u); Waikane Valley, He’eia Range, Wailupe Range, and the islands of Mokoli’i (known also as Chinaman’s Hat, off Kualoa Point), Kaohikaipu (the small island near Rabbit Island, or Manana), Mokulua (actually two small islands off Lanikai, Moku Manu, and Mokuaiua (off La’ie).
“Two smaller islands, Molokini and Mokuleia, have been cleared, but more duds will probably appear,” the report stated.
Also on the warning list were these areas in Kaua’i: Waimea impact area; Kaua’i desert; Waialua; Grove Farm; Anahola-Maloa’a, and Knudsen’s Cap, and the rocket ranges at Asaki ranch and Barking Sands.
On the Big Island, visitors were cautioned to “beware of the following areas: Pohakuloa, Kilauea and Pakiniii” – the latter probably a reference to Pakini Iki (at South Point). They were all described as artillery areas.
Is It Safe?
Most, if not all, of the off-shore islands are protected from any sort of development. Still, they are frequently used by hikers, picnickers, and people fishing. Ordnance will probably be on these islands forever, waiting for the right trigger to explode.
A bomb disposal professional, in private practice, told Environment Hawai’i that he would not set foot on Rabbit Island. Evidence persists that other islands, too, are not ordnance free. A few years ago, a bomb was found off Molokini, which regularly was pounded by 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound anti-ship bombs during the war. Indeed, when ordnance was being removed from Molokini following World War II, the operation was described by The Hawai’i Weekly of June 20, 1954, as follows:
“The squad was put ashore early one morning with dynamite and fuses. By late afternoon, it had unearthed dozens of bombs the size of a single bed. The smaller ones were detonated together with a common fuse. The larger ones were laced together and exploded with a 45-minute fuses. The crew was taken five miles off the island in a launch to watch the explosion. When it came, it blew the whole of one side of the island into the sea. Boulders were blown more than a mile from the island and into the sea.”
On Fast Land
That same article in The Hawai’i Weekly describes clean-up areas elsewhere on the islands. “The gulches and firing ranges of O’ahu were the hardest to clear,” it reported. “The men scaled steep slopes through lantana and actually dug into the face of red earth cliffs seeking out bazooka and rifle grenades. In Makua Valley, O’ahu, they found everything from 100-pound aerial bombs to whole cases of machine-gun ammunition.
“Private property in the middle of a residential district was no exception. On the grounds and in guava bushes surrounding a wartime service club in the Coconut Grove in Kailua, O’ahu, the bomb disposal team found more than 50 hand grenades.”
Coconut Grove and a good many of the other areas used during World War II as cantonment areas or training areas have been developed for decades. The likelihood of finding ordnance on those sites is remote.
But as development extends into hillsides that were target areas for live-ammunition ranges or aerial bombardment, the possibility grows that ordnance left over from World War II will be discovered. Private owners – like the Kamakas – wanting to use training areas for other purposes, and expecting fully that, under lease terms, they will be able to do so, may be in for a rude discovery.
— Patricia Tummons
1 See page 14 of Shulman’s book, which is reviewed in this issue of Environment Hawai`i, in an article titled “Teaching Camels to Fly: Can The Pentagon Win This War?”.
2 The map is drawn from maps included in a document entitled “History of G-3, Headquarters, Army Forces, Middle Pacific, Functions and Activities, 7 December 1941 – 2 September 1945,” prepared under the direction of the commanding general, Lt. Gen. Robert G. Richardson, Jr. For years after the war, this document was classified as secret. It is available in microfilm at the University of Hawai`i’s Hamilton Library.
3 This information is based on the “G-3 History,” Volume II, which contains an exhaustive account of all the training areas and their associated facilities.
Volume 3, Number 2 August 1992