Fifty years ago, Pearl Harbor earned a place in the nation’s history, for which it is now justly receiving attention. But the honor that is its due cannot be paid in full so long as the area itself remains an environmental disgrace. In our view, there can be no more fitting monument, no more appropriate tribute, to the sacrifices made December 7, 1941, than the effort to do everything possible to restore the harbor to health.
While Pearl Harbor is a shoo-in for imminent inclusion on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List (the infamous Superfund roster), the Navy has not waited for the listing to become official before launching the studies and site assessments required under Superfund protocols. By last September 30, the end of the federal fiscal year for 1991, the Navy had spent $12 million on preliminary site assessments and remedial plans for many of the contaminated areas, including some that are outside the Superfund scope. To carry out the cleanup work, the Navy estimates that at least $46 million more will be required.
If the Navy is already doing this, then what difference will Superfund listing make? It will make the cleanup plans for the Superfund sites subject to EPA approval; it will require that the Navy solicit broader public involvement than it has yet done; and it will impose a strict schedule of deadlines for cleanup plans and action. Not to be overlooked, Superfund listing may enhance the Navy’s ability to get Congress to appropriate funds adequate to the cleanup task. That’s all to the good.
The Public’s Stake
The most important of these considerations is public review and comment, which so far has been conspicuously absent. The Navy has shared its site investigation and cleanup plans with other state and federal agencies, but to date it has received little meaningful comment from any party.
The fault rests not on the Navy’s shoulders alone. In 1989, at the time the Navy launched its ambitious cleanup program for Pearl Harbor, it invited members of the press and broadcast media to attend. According to the Navy, the response was disappointing. Navy spokesmen report also that they have solicited comment from selected community leaders – whose response was a polite yawn.
The state Department of Health claims to have been handicapped in its ability to respond to Navy cleanup plans by a lack of funds. That may be expected to change soon. At the end of September, the Department of Health executed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense, providing in principle for the federal government to reimburse the state its costs of monitoring cleanup programs at federal sites. When the Pearl Harbor Base is added to the Superfund list, a more specific tripartite agreement for state involvement will be negotiated involving the Navy, the Department of Health, and the EPA.
The scope of the work that lies ahead staggers comprehension. Given the investment of public money that this represents, to say nothing of the value of the natural resource whose restoration is ultimately at stake, it is imperative that the public leap at every opportunity for meaningful involvement.
For the Navy, the burden is to develop community relations plans that go beyond hiring public relations firms to prepare reports that are less than honest in their representations of environmental risk and verging on contemptuous in their regard of the public’s ability to understand the issues.
Are We Dying Yet?
At a recent seminar on environmental law; an attorney describing herself as one of the state’s foremost experts in this area was reported to have remarked that “No one has ever died from PCBs.” Cleanup standards for PCBs in soil and water are extremely stringent; the clear implication of such remarks as hers is that the public is wasting its money when it spends millions of dollars cleaning up sites contaminated with PCBs and other harmful chemicals.
Cancers do not come with labels attached to tell doctors what has caused them. With rare exceptions, linking cancer in humans to their exposures to specific chemicals is a dicey undertaking, complicated by the fact that tumors and cancers usually not show up until years or even decades after exposure to cancer-causing or cancer-promoting substances. However, in laboratory settings, using animals that are believed to respond in the same fashion as humans do to chemical exposures, cancers can be more precisely explained. And in this context, PCBs have caused reactions that do indeed justify the extreme caution dictated by EPA regulations. And not just PCBs, but a whole slew of substances that are found in the water and soil in and around Pearl Harbor.
Besides, more is at risk at Pearl Harbor than the health of humans. To hold out the protection of human health as the sole standard by which to judge the utility of measures necessary to make whole our natural world is cruel, short-sighted, and ultimately self-defeating. Human health in the midst of a polluted environment will not last long.
Beyond the Navy
Had Pearl Harbor not become a naval base, and even imagining that industrial users had somehow been kept from clustering along its shores as they have done in many of the state’s other harbors, Pearl Harbor would continue to be polluted by streams carrying pesticides and nutrients from cane and pine fields and residential areas, runoff from city streets, and silt from construction sites. (In the dry season, streams empty about 50 million gallons a day into Pearl Harbor. In the rainy season, the volume can be more than twice that.) Hydrocarbon contaminants would continue to leach into the waters from leaving underground storage tanks and pipelines. And the shellfish would have not avoided the harm inflicted by the years when millions of gallons a day of effluent were discharged from sewage treatment plants into harbor waters.
The Navy’s cleanup plans are just a beginning. If Pearl Harbor is to be restored and the Pearl Harbor aquifer is to be protected, the state Department of Health must act aggressively to control other sources of contaminants.
Restore, and Reclaim
For more than a century, Pearl Harbor has been made servant to the wishes the Navy, which has turned out to be a poor steward indeed of the priceless natural resources that the harbor once contained. It is not inappropriate for the public to ask the Navy not only to clean up after itself, but to develop a plan under which enjoyment of the restored harbor area is shared with the public.
It will be decades, if ever, before many of the creatures that once inhabited the harbor return, before the water that feeds the refuge for endangered birds will be pristine, before toxic chemicals are flushed from the surrounding soils. That said, there is not a moment to waste in getting started on the monumental task that lies ahead.
Volume 2, Number 6 December 1991
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