 Okay, we're back real live. This is Think Tech OIMJ Fidel. And we're talking about community matters, including where we get our water from and how we can plan for a sustainable future of water and what the Red Hill tanks have to do with any of that. And for this discussion, we're gonna talk to a geologist, more specifically a hydrogeologist retired from DLNR. And that's Paul Eyre. Paul, thank you for joining us on the show. It's my pleasure, Dave, thank you. So Paul, tell us where do we get our water, at least here in Oahu, but what's the source of it and how reliable is it right now today? The source is rainfall, falling on the land, infiltrating through the rocks and accumulating near sea level and below sea level, a big body of fresh water. Let's look at slide one and then we'll see more relevant to where we are right now. Okay. All right, do you see diamond head? And when you go in, you have the crest of the Coal Lows. Then you swing up and swing across Oahua, then swing down the Waianae crest. That whole area receives the rainfall that that area receives, infiltrates into the ground and forms a large body of groundwater in the subsurface, very large, that whole area is more or less a single body of water. Now- It's like a lake, it's like a lake in there, right? It's just a big lake. I know, I don't know if you recognize that people do believe that. I hope you don't believe that. In fact, the water occupies cracks and pucas in the rock. We all know what lava rock looks like. You drive up the Pahway Highway, look at the rocks, layers, layers of rocks, cracks in the rocks, pucas in the rock. That's what it's like. This island goes below sea level, obviously. We're not floating on the water. So down with depth, the slopes of the volcano continue down below sea level and all those lava rocks with their cracks and their pucas hold the fresh water that then we pump. Normally, we consider the groundwater flows Malka Makai. It rains in the uplands and it discharges near the shore. So we go Malka Makai. It's not static. Every day you get more recharge from the rain and every day water discharges at the shore. Now, so we think about Malka Makai but because we're gonna focus on Red Hill, we must also realize that water from Honolulu, not only does it flow Malka Makai, it also flows towards Pearl Harbor. Why? Why does it do that? It has a hard time getting out at Honolulu. The way the rocks are, the way the sediments are piled up against the lava rock, that water just has a hard time getting out. So it builds up to a high level and then whatever doesn't come out the wells or seep out near the shore in Honolulu flows to the Northwest over across Moanalua, Red Hill, and then into Halava. So you have the water going both ways. It's important now because there's a concern that the contamination at Red Hill from the fuel tanks will migrate over to the Board of Water Supplies pumping station near H3 over by North Halava Valley. So which way the water naturally flows is something that's getting a lot of attention now. So the tanks, can you describe the tanks and where is the water flowing with relative to where the tanks are? Let's look at slide number two. Oh, okay. All right. So if you remember that peach shaded area in the previous picture, that was centered on Red Hill and Halava. So now we focused in on that peach shaded area. This is Red Hill Ridge. Those, you can count 10 pairs of two tanks going up the ridge. They look, the ridge is actually transparent in this application. Those tanks are underground. They're cocooned and scanced in that ridge. And so... How big are they, Paul? How big are those tanks? Yeah. Well, 250, each tank is 250 feet tall, 100 feet across. And I think it's about 60 feet between the edge of each tank. And they hold 12 and a half million gallons of fuel. Now... Now this is built by the military back in World War II. The whole thing was constructed way back when? From 1938 to 1941 or two, the crews, mining crews from the mainland were brought out here and they dug and they blasted and they hollowed out that mountain. Actually, no, they didn't hollow it out. Each of those tanks is its own hollowed out area inside the rock. They formed that area, poured that concrete, four foot thick walls of concrete for each tank and then they lined the inside with quarter inch steel plates. Then they injected grout between the rock and the, between the outside of the concrete and the rocks. They injected grout at high pressure to just firm the whole thing up. So it's quite securely embedded in the mountain. Was this in accordance with the standards of construction for tanks being constructed at that time? And is it consistent with the standards of construction for tanks like that that would be built today? These tanks are unique. I don't think the engineer did not go to the engineering handbook and decide how to build these. They figured out they wanted to put these tanks in the mountain to protect them. Also, they don't occupy a lot of land space. I mean, they're in there. If you moved about it there, they'd have to exist somewhere on land where we'd see them and they'd be vulnerable to other mischief, mischief. So there weren't standards, but the engineers were real engineers and they're well-made. This is 80 years ago now. They're well-made, but they made them in a terrific hurry. It's the war's coming. They worked day and night, 24, 24, 7, blasting. I forget how many men died 20, 30, 40, something. Wow. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, it's a tremendous feat. And so there's those tanks and then there's tunnels that run between the tanks for access. And then there's the pipes that refill the tanks with fuel and take the fuel out and route it down to Pearl Harbor. Now, in addition- When you say, excuse me, when you say access, you mean that sometimes people have to get down, what, into the tank when the tank is empty, in order to do that, then you have these tunnels for access. Am I right? There's no, no. The tunnels are outside the tanks. Let's go back to slide two again. Okay, you see between the rows of tanks, they're separated. There's a tunnel there, people work, they spend their days there monitoring the equipment. So they go, you know, tank one and two closest to you, tank 19 and 20 at the far end. There's a tunnel with a train car and the fuel lines and the water lines all inside that tunnel. And that's the access tunnel I'm talking about. One more thing now, at the same time they're building the tanks, they're also putting in a water system that can pump from up to 15 million gallons a day of water. And that, if you follow that access tunnel line down from the tanks, a ways, then you see it bends to the left and then you kind of see a triangle down, down at the far end there. That's where the water pumping station is. That's also inside the mountain underground and it's pumping, like I say, five to 15 million gallons a day. And then the tunnel that goes off to your right leads down to Pearl Harbor where it delivers the fuel and the water. Now, if we look at slide three, well, there's a couple more things I wanna say about that. Let's go back to that one, two. Okay, I'm not showing it to you here but at the bottom of those tanks, those tanks are 80 years old. Of course they've leaked. Sometimes it's just chronic little small leaks, sometimes it's major 50,000 gallon leaks. Rare, those are rare, but they have happened. So beneath the tanks, the rock just beneath the tanks is horribly contaminated, solid, not solid, but fuel residue occupying all the cracks in the pores in the rocks. And then beneath that, if you go down, so those tanks, 250 feet tall, if you go 100 feet below those tanks, you'll be at sea level. From the bottom of the tanks down to 100 feet, you'll be at sea level. The contamination that leaked out of the tanks worked its way down to the water table and the aquifer beneath those tanks is 10 to 40 times beyond the EPA's action level with respect to total petroleum hydrocarbons. What does that mean? Non-potable, couldn't drink it. I don't know if it'd give you cancer or just make you throw up, but either way that's the state of the groundwater beneath those tanks. So let me ask you this, you mentioned aquifer and I guess it's an important term here. Above sea level is the aquifer, below at sea level would be the lens, right? Where the freshwater and the seawater meet and then below the lens would be the seawater, am I right? Correct, and that lens is, the top of that lens is about 20 feet above sea level. The bottom of that lens is about 800 feet below sea level. You look at those drops and in the image behind you, you see those drops of water. Picture one of those being the size of that first area I showed you from Diamondhead to the Wyonites. That drop occupying from 20 feet above sea level to 800 feet below sea level, but within the cracks and holes of the rocks is what's down there. And that's the aquifer. So can you picture that? Yes, yeah. Okay, so almost anywhere you drill, you'll drill down to sea level, you'll hit water at 20 feet above sea level, like in our neighborhood, we're at 600 feet. We could drill down about 20, 25 feet above sea level. We'd hit the top of the water table and we could keep drilling for several hundred more feet and have all that water available. So that's the aquifer that occupies that area from slide one. Okay, so now we have the corrosion. We have some of the residue from the petroleum that leaked out, some little, some lot. We have it seeping into the rock. We have, as you described, the freshwater and the seawater connection. What do we need to be concerned about there? If the residue stops, if the petroleum stops at a given point, why are we worried? As a hydrologist, I look at the future of water development from this island. There'll come a time when the amount we pump now, well, as the population grows, we're gonna need more and more water. So we have two ways to handle that. Stop growing the population, don't let anybody come to the state, don't have any more babies, or account for the increase in population and pump accordingly. Well, we're already pumping 140 million, the board of water supply, which is most of all the pumpage, is 140 million gallons a day of water being pumped from the island. There's not a whole lot more than that available. So every million gallon a day that you can, we're going to need it in the future. And with the contamination at Redhill, one option is we just ride off that area, that shaded pink area that on the first slide or beneath the tanks. We ride off that area and say, no, I'm not gonna get any more water from this area. Well, water's too precious for that to be the conclusion. And so the point should be, I think, and it's quite feasible, is to operate those tanks better, reduce the leakage and to clean up the, call it the mess that's there right now. All of these are quite feasible and straightforward. But so for me, that's the concern is to not be riding off portions of the aquifer that can continue to yield more water. What the general population and the board of water supply are very concerned about is that the water will move from Redhill off to the west, cross South Halava Valley, cross North Halava Valley, and then reach the Board of Water Supply to the Lava Shaft and contaminate that water, which would just be disastrous because that's one of the most important sources of water for the board. I don't believe that's going to happen. If the water, it's not sure that the water even goes that way. If it does, it's highly unlikely that the concentrations of contaminants would ever be high enough to be measured there. And two, let's see, there's a slide where, let's try slide number four. All right, again, in the middle of all those blue things that are hard to read, you'll see the 20 tanks inside the ridge. At the top of the screen to the left, that's where the Board of Water Supply's Halava Shaft is. In between is the Halava Industrial Park and the prison. Well, those are the observation wells that have been put in since 2005 around the tanks to monitor the degree of contamination. If there was ever a concern for Halava Shaft, those wells would start to show it, you'd see it. As of now, those wells to the northwest of the tanks do not show contamination. Someone might argue and say, oh, they do, but it's very small and very rare. The monitor wells that show contamination are those three blue dots in the middle of the 20 tanks. Those are the ones that show 10 to 40 times the concentration of hydrocarbons that the EPA, it's the action level for the EPA to say, hey, you've got to do something about this. Also, the Navy's pumping well, which is off to the left, about half a mile down from the tanks towards the ocean, towards Salt Lake. That well also shows wisps of contamination every now and then. When there's a big leak back in 2014, 13, 14, at one of the tanks, about two years later, we saw a bump in the contamination at the Red Hill Pumping Station. That well, that was way below the action level, not a health concern, but to me it shows that well, the water does go there and in fact, the contamination will move to where you pump the water. Well, let me go to the headline phase of this. I guess from time to time, the figures of contamination are released to the public or the press and then somebody gets excited that there's contamination and it violates the EPA standard. And then what we have is a reaction by environmental groups who say, no, that's not so good, we can't have that water, you've got to do something. And then it seems like it's usually an attack on the Navy. This is all the Navy's fault. The Navy, I mean, I don't have a sense of exactly what their complaint is, but I think it's the Navy's fault and the Navy should remove these tanks, they don't need these tanks, store the fuel somewhere else or don't store the fuel anywhere and give us our groundwater back. And that doesn't seem very practical, but it seems to me that's the nature of a very broad-based complaint against the Navy about this contamination. You're saying though that it's manageable in various other ways and my question to you is, has it been managed or is it just happening anyway? Let me take a short break, Paul. We're gonna take a short break, we'll be right back after this break and we'll resume our conversation on the groundwater and the Red Hill tanks and how we can make things work for clean water in Oahu. My name is Mark Shklav, I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Being a lawyer has many aspects and I try to cover them every time I do a program of law across the sea. Not everything has to do with law or being a lawyer per se. Some of it has to do with the people you meet, the things you see, the places you visit. And that's what I try to combine in Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Thank you for watching, Aloha. Okay, we're back, we're live with Paul Eyre. He's a hydrogeologist, was with DLNR, the Department of Land and Natural Resources State of Hawaii and he's retired now. But he's telling us about how water works on the groundwater system in Oahu and how it interacts with the tanks at Red Hill, which still today are used for fuel, which sometimes leaks out of the bottoms. So Paul, people want to remove the tanks and do drastic things, but maybe that's not really necessary in any event that would be pretty expensive. And maybe it wouldn't even solve the problem. What should be done to solve the problem? What has the Navy done so far and what could be done now? To emphasize what you just said, let's look at slide two. No, let's look at slide three. All right. That's your 250 feet tall and 100 feet across and your quarter inch steel liners on the concrete. That's what you're talking about, abandoning 20 of those. That's what you're talking about, abandoning and finding some other place on the island for that. You don't want to do that if you don't have to. Well, I know what people would say, sure, but not in my backyard or anywhere near me. Right. That's what they would say. And here, if you don't have to, why would you move this? And, but, well, the why is because, well, you've contaminated the aquifer, but like I say, that's manageable. This contamination I'm talking about is only in the top couple of inches. We talked about the top and the bottom of the freshwater lens. This, the fuel that leaks out of this tank through the steel, through the concrete, down to the water table, exist in just the top couple of inches of the aquifer. So it's not like you've destroyed the aquifer. You've made it a lot more difficult to get more water from, but just to put it in perspective, it's not like it's ruined from top to bottom. And so the solution for, I believe, in which the Navy hasn't done a good job about is maintaining the tanks, repairing the tanks. I mean, they've worked very hard at it. You can see all the white dots in this picture, the orange square and the lower left, those guys in the basket, they're inspecting this whole surface, top to bottom, round and around, finding every point that might leak. Then people are gonna come in and weld patches where they need to do the work they need to seal this tank up again. That job has not been done well enough, and you might say, or often enough. But now because of the spill, 27,000 gallon spill in 2000, call it January, December 13, January 14, because of that spill. What year was that? December, 2013, January, 2014. The tank had been under repair for three or four years, something like what we just looked at. Then in December, 2013, the contractor said, okay, job well done, certified, fill the tank up with fuel. Boom, it leaked, it leaked right away. They had to quick rush, shut it down, 27,000 gallons leaked out, and that's the latest spill that has caused all the ruckus. That spill was the result of very bad workmanship and very bad contract management by the Navy. The EPA, the DOH and the Navy have prepared and are negotiating and having public meetings about what they call the administrative order on consent that will define how the Navy must operate so that that doesn't happen again. In that AOC, the Navy acknowledges how bad the workmanship was, and the fact that they let Port Waimimi in California do the contractor oversight, which of course didn't work. So they've acknowledged their culpability. They've got new home standards of how they will operate and maintain the tanks. In the next year or two, the 22 tanks are scheduled for inspection and repair. The last overall inspection repair was in 1980. They're supposed to get inspected and repaired again in 2000 on a 20-year timeframe. They missed most of the tanks. They worked on a couple, but they didn't work on most of them. So over the next couple of years, they're going to inspect and repair the 20 tanks. Now, if they do that well, that then... That's my last question to you. If they do that well, should we rest easy? Or do we need other systems in addition? For example, a system to clean up the water and remove all the hydrocarbons from the water. I don't know if that's possible. Just a sort of a backup clean-up system. What steps beyond this AOC, you called it? This country. Administrative order of consent. How the Navy must operate. Yeah, beyond that, is there anything else we need to do to feel comfortable about the purity of our water in Oahu? Well, I wouldn't leave that part yet because we said if they do it well. I'm not sure if there's anything in the AOC that forces them to do it well. I think there should be fines. There should be penalties. Part of the AOC should be this contamination that I've described so far. They should be getting rid of it. They should be cleaning it up. Yeah. And they can. Who's watching on this? To me, we're almost out of time, Paul. And I want to just close with your answer to this question. Who's watching? Because I think just as the Navy has been irregular in its maintenance, so has the public been irregular in its observation. And so if we all return to our corners and the time goes by, it will be back in the same place. So who's watching? Is it DLNR? Is it some other federal agency? Who's going to make sure that our water supply is pure? Statewide, for the state, the lead is the Department of Health. The Water Commission, DLNR, the Water Commission at DLNR, I'd say should be more involved, because that is their mandate is to maintain the sustainability of Hawaii's waters. And then the EPA is also a big player. So the big players are the EPA, the State Department of Health, and the Navy. Somehow, I think in the same way the Navy needs to oversee their contractors better, somebody needs to oversee the Navy better. I don't know how that gets accomplished. Oh, I think it's simple. It's you and me, Paul. It's you and me. We'll have to regroup on this and examine from time to time how things are going. Because I think the stats are out there. Somebody has to look at it. Somebody has to remind the contracting parties that we are depending on them for clean water. We'll cover this again. Paul Iyer, our retired hydro geologist for DLNR, really appreciate the insight, the sort of an underground insight of what's going on at Red Hill. Thanks so much, Paul. Aloha. OK.