At the request of the state Department of Health (DOH), the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and various U.S. military agencies, two state Senate committees last month deferred a bill that would have effectively forced the Navy to completely double-line or cathodically protect its active Red Hill fuel storage tanks within ten years.
Sen. Mike Gabbard introduced the bill, SB 1168, which mirrors many of the concepts proposed in rules being drafted by the EPA for field-constructed underground storage tanks (USTs).
The bill’s preamble notes that the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, which includes 20 250-foot-deep, 150-foot-wide, 72-year-old tanks capable of storing up to 187 million gallons of fuel, is located just 100 feet above a primary drinking water source. However, Hawai`i Administrative Rules exempt all field-constructed USTs from leak protection standards required for other UST owners and operators. (Field-constructed tanks are those that are built on-site.) Such an exemption for the state’s largest underground storage tank system “is extremely detrimental to human health and the environment,”the bill stated. As such, the bill proposed ending that exemption.
Had the bill passed, currently exempt tanks or tank systems would have been subject to stricter leak monitoring, record-keeping, corrosion protection, spill, and overfill requirements.
Tanks constructed or installed before July 1, 2015, would have been required to be cathodically protected or be secondarily contained and interstitially monitored.
The bill set a deadline of July 1, 2025, for owners and operators to complete the upgrades or permanently close the tanks or tank systems. Also, anyone relying on vapor and groundwater monitoring to detect UST leaks would have five years to implement another release detection monitoring method in accordance with federal regulations.
Ernie Lau, manager and chief engineer for the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, testified in favor of the bill, as did the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Massapequa (New York) Water District’s superintendent, Stan Carey.
Carey lamented that his agency is dealing with “the largest groundwater contamination plume in the country that is emanating from the Grumman-Navy facility located in Bethpage, New York. …This massive plume now impacts and/or threatens 25 supply wells that provide drinking water to over 250,000 people.”
Gabbard’s proposed legislation is “critical to proactive drinking water protection,”Carey wrote.
Bad Timing
In the next couple of months, the DOH and the EPA are expected to publish their long-awaited enforcement agreement regarding the release last year of an estimated 27,000 gallons of jet fuel from the Red Hill facility.
The agreement, called an Administrative Order on Consent (AOC), will likely require the Navy and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to increase maintenance efforts, improve oversight, provide more data, and, if necessary, install more monitoring wells, Gary Gill, former DOH director of environmental management, told the state Commission on Water Resource Management at its January 28 meeting. The agreement may also require the Navy to upgrade the tanks, he said.
The kinds of upgrades that will be required will depend on the results of studies by the Navy and the DLA of technologies that could reduce the likelihood of future fuel releases. The studies will be a requirement of the agreement, according to testimony on the bill from the EPA’s Jared Blumenfeld.
“Once the appropriate upgrade of technologies are determined by the studies, the AOC would require the Navy and DLA to upgrade all of the Red Hill tanks that will remain in-use. Secondary containment is one of the upgrade technologies that will be evaluated. However, to date, we have not identified any tanks of similar design to Red Hill where a secondary containment retrofit has been installed successfully. Given the size of the facility and the technical issues involved, it is likely that any major improvements to the Red Hill tanks will require more than ten years to implement,”Blumenfeld stated.
Blumenfeld, along with U.S. Army Brigadier General John O’Neil, U.S. Navy Capt. Dean Tufts, and the DOH requested a deferral of the bill.
“The AOC is intended to establish a process to make well-researched, well-planned and cost-effective improvements to protect the groundwater resource beneath the Red Hill [facility]. …Unfortunately, S.B. 1168 may have the unintended consequence of complicating the ongoing negotiations by requiring a specific solution which may not yet be practical,”the DOH stated in testimony submitted February 17 to the Committee on Energy and the Environment.
That day, the committee deferred the bill and the Committee on Health followed suit the next day. Although the bill had been referred to the Committee on Commerce and Consumer Protection and the Committee on Ways and Means, no hearings on the bill by those committees had been set by press time.
Although the DOH had asked for a deferral, in his comments to the Water Commission weeks earlier, Gill seemed to support the bill’s intent to force the Navy to either upgrade the tanks at Red Hill or shut them down. (Gill, who was not reappointed by Gov. David Ige, has since left the DOH.)
The Navy disputes any suggestion that the Red Hill tanks —other than the one that leaked last year —are faulty. Even so, Gill told the Water Commission at its January 28 meeting, “These tanks all could be leaking, a constant, slow drip. I think that’s what’s happening.”
The ground beneath all 20 of the tanks are stained with fuel and, according to a 1998 study, some 1.2 million gallons of fuel —in addition to the 27,000 gallons reported to have been lost last year —may have already leaked, he said.
Short of closing the facility, Gill continued, the best way to mitigate the groundwater threat is to apply the best industry standards, i.e., double walls and advanced leak detection.
“Right now, [leaked fuel] goes straight into the environment and you don’t know the damage until it’s done,”he said.
If and when the technology or methods become available to double-line the tanks, the public will have to decide whether it’s cost-effective to upgrade them.
“If it costs a dollar, well, why not? If it costs a million, well, maybe. If it costs a billion, is it worth that investment? That’s a political, public call we all have a stake in,”he said.
Bills for the Bills
Although the AOC is expected to be finalized soon, the DOH may not have the resources to ensure adequate enforcement and oversight, Gill said.
“Our program is broke,”he said of the DOH’s Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response Branch, noting that the department could not make payroll last November for some of the key staff members working on Red Hill.
To ensure the state has adequate funds to maintain robust oversight of activities at Red Hill and the few dozen other field constructed underground storage tanks around the state, state House representatives introduced three bills this legislative session that would provide funds to the DOH to address concerns regarding Red Hill and other leaking underground storage tanks.
While two bills —House Bill 987 and HB 645 —seek a one-time appropriation, House Bill 1087, introduced by Rep. Chris Lee, would raise the percentage of the state barrel tax that goes to the DOH’s Environmental Response Revolving Fund from 5 cents to 15 cents per barrel of oil. The bill would also establish a task force to address issues surrounding field-constructed tanks, including those at Red Hill.
— Teresa Dawson