People living and camping at Makua Beach have attracted the wrath of the Army from time to time over the years of Army occupation of Makua Valley. Now, as in the 1960s and 1970s, the Army is trying to get the state of Hawai’i to evict them. The unsanitary conditions in which these homeless Hawaiians dwell pose a threat to health and the environment, the Army has stated.
The Army’s concerns for human health, sanitation, and the environment are laudable. If the Army is sincere, however, it might look to its own activities at Makua Valley, beside which any threats posed by the occupants of Makua Beach vanish into utter insignificance.
There are the fires that the Army continues to set, deliberately or accidentally, which burn up the valley sides and threaten endangered plants and snails. There are the open burns and open detonations of munitions and other chemicals, including some that are known to cause cancer in humans.
There is the matter of unexploded munitions having been scattered everywhere into this once productive valley, making it unsuitable for any human activity other than the training of soldiers for combat. There are the once forested valley walls laid bare and eroding thanks to years of shelling; the diversity of plant life reduced to stands of molasses grass; the sites of Hawaiian habitation and worship, both ancient and modern, trashed.
Against all this, the Army has the cheek to complain about the health and environmental problems posed by the few dozen homeless of Makua Beach!
The RCRA Permit
When unserviceable munitions from military installations on O’ahu need to be destroyed, they are brought to Makua Valley where they are burned or blown up. To do this, the Army must have a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency.
But when the Army burns or blows up unserviceable munitions that it says have been brought to Makua Valley for training purposes, it claims (without argument) that this activity is exempt from EPA regulation.
Both actions are identical, although the quantity of unserviceable munitions brought from other facilities is, the Army states, far smaller than the quantity destroyed as a result of training activities at Makua. Both produce contamination of air, water, and soil.
The draft permit submitted by the Army to the EPA contains hundreds of pages of computer data predicting that the pollutants resulting from regulated activity will have a negligible impact on human health. The overall impression is a daunting one of scientific precision and computer-age accuracy. But when it is recalled that these calculations are based only on the pollutants spewed into the environment by the regulated activity; and that, by the Army’s admission, the regulated activity is “minuscule” compared to the unregulated activity, the calculations, no matter how accurate or precise, are rendered worthless. The human body responds not just to that portion of pollutants issued with the blessing of the EPA regulators, but to the total quantity of pollutants to which it is exposed, regardless of their source.
In other respects, too, the Army’s draft permit is flawed. The half-page discussion of endangered species would be amusing were it not pathetic. The inadequacy of data used in generating computer models of pollution pathways is difficult to take, in light of the vast array of Army site studies over the years.
That the Army paid a consultant, Halliburton NUS, hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a document as embarrassing as this means either that the Army felt it didn’t matter (that no one would call them on it), or that the Army itself is not aware of the deficiencies. In either case, the public can take little comfort.
The EPA deserves to be admonished, too, for its failure to investigate the Army’s claims by following through on its RCRA facility assessment process. The public has entrusted the EPA to act on its behalf, particularly when it comes to digesting the technical information provided by the facilities under EPA regulation. By not reviewing the Army’s data more critically – especially when the consultants it hired indicated the need to do this – the EPA has let the public down.
Endangered Species
The EPA is not the only agency to have let slide its responsibility to protect the public’s interests. The Fish and Wildlife Service also has been all too willing to accept Army claims without challenge when it comes to the impact of Army activities on endangered species at Makua Valley. With such lax oversight, it is small wonder indeed that the Army appears to believe it can do as it likes in the valley so long as it avoids being caught in the act.
The population of Achatinella mustelina near Makua Valley is the largest to be found anywhere. That makes the protection of this endangered tree snail all the more imperative. Some of the populations of endangered plant species in or around Makua Valley are thought to be so small as to number in the dozens. To say they are fragile hardly describes the situation: few members of the plant or animal kingdom are equipped to withstand decades of attack by the most lethal non-nuclear weapons in the Army’s arsenal. Although the Army has technically complied with the requirements of the Endangered Species Act that it consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the endangered snails, it has not even broached the subject with regard to the endangered plants.
Interlopers
The Army has occupied Makua Valley since 1942, and for a good part of that time its legal claim on the land was thin. Hawaiian genealogies indicate Makua Valley was occupied continuously for 35 generations, 800 years, give or take. Yet now it is the Army calling the Hawaiians squatters.
Throughout the centuries of Hawaiian occupation, the water was clean, the fish abundant, the soil productive, the natural resources healthy. In the half-century of Army use, the natural and cultural resources of the site have been wantonly abused, to the point that many may never be retrieved, however many dollars the Army plows back into environmental studies, biological assessments, cultural and archaeological surveys, remedial actions and the like.
Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but when it comes to rightful ownership – legitimate ownership earned through careful husbandry of resources and a love of and respect for the land as the home of ancestors past and descendants to come – the Army has no ground on which to stand.
The island of Kaho’olawe is finally to be restored by the Navy and returned to some public use. For years, though, the Navy had claimed that contamination of Kaho’olawe was so great as to make its clean-up impossible or unfeasible.
The ordnance contamination of Makua Valley has been compared to that of Kaho’olawe. If Kaho’olawe can be restored, why not Makua Valley as well?
Volume 3, Number 5 November 1992