Following a U.S. Navy fuel leak that contaminated Pearl Harbor’s drinking water in 2021, the Navy tested some 8,000 samples to ensure the water had been flushed of impurities. 

Throughout the testing, the Navy maintained the results were proof the water was safe. 

But now, military officials are acknowledging the testing method they’ve been using for two years may have been inappropriate for assessing drinking water quality. The results the Navy has held up as meeting state and federal standards may, in fact, create more questions than answers.

The Navy now says it is working on a new one-year plan with regulators to pursue testing that allows for more precision.

“We’re going to be testing for all the components that would be found, and would make up, jet fuel,” Navy Capt. James Sullivan said in a recent public meeting.

Until now, much of the Navy’s testing has focused on total petroleum hydrocarbons, known as TPH. Pearl Harbor’s water has yielded consistent detections of TPH at low, almost imperceptible levels, according to the Navy. But what that means for public health is unclear.

Testing a water sample for TPH could potentially indicate the presence of fuel, but it could also flag other substances like algae. The test isn’t able to differentiate, Navy environmental engineer Chris Waldron said at a public meeting last month. 

The effort to understand the test results is further complicated by the fact that the TPH test was designed for wastewater samples, not drinking water samples, according to the Navy. The presence of chlorine, which is routinely added to drinking water for disinfection, seems to be reacting in the samples, making the results difficult to interpret, the Navy says. Waldron called the results “false positives.” 

Additional testing by the Navy using other methods has led the military to conclude whatever is in the water is not JP-5, the kind of jet fuel spilled from the Red Hill fuel storage facility in 2021. 

But Navy officials admit they don’t know what it is. 

The Navy has suggested there may have been cross-contamination at the lab. Regulators have not endorsed that theory but also haven’t offered alternative explanations. 

The issue was a hot topic at a recent meeting of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative, or CRI, a group formed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that is made up of residents and advocates.

EPA regional drinking water manager Corrine Li told the panel her agency is awaiting “evidence to support the Navy’s conclusions.” Kathleen Ho, Hawaii’s deputy director of environmental health, gave a similar answer.  

“We do believe the hypothesis needs to be validated,” she said. 

That the Navy is now casting doubt on its own testing has unsettled and angered residents who wonder why it took two years for the Navy, Hawaii Department of Health and EPA to recognize the flaws in the testing plan they collectively signed in 2022.

Lacey Quintero, whose family developed health problems when they lived on the Navy water line, is frustrated.

“To me, it just seems like one step forward, 1,000 steps backward,” she said at the CRI meeting. 

“It seems like we should’ve thought about this years ago … We know chlorine is in drinking water, so this isn’t a surprise that we just figured out after we took these 8,000 samples.” 

Since the fuel leak, numerous community members have repeatedly expressed their belief that Pearl Harbor’s tap water still isn’t safe. Residents on the Navy water line have reported ongoing and new health symptoms they believe to be connected to the water. But they say their concern has been met with assurances from the Navy, which they consider unconvincing, that the test results showed no problems. 

The Navy has repeatedly noted that all its TPH results fall under 266 parts per billion. That limit, called an incident-specific parameter, is the level beyond which regulators and the Navy agreed further action would be taken. It does not necessarily indicate whether the water is a threat to human health. 

Residents have complained about the parameter — also referred to as an environmental action level, or EAL — for years now. They’ve asked how water could be deemed acceptable if they could still smell a gas-like odor or see a sheen on their water. Indeed, a World Health Organization report from 2022 notes that hydrocarbons can produce diesel-like odors at only a few parts per billion. 

Army Maj. Mandy Feindt, an outspoken advocate for families like hers who were sickened by fuel-tainted water, is calling on regulators to issue a Do Not Use water advisory until it’s clear the water is safe.

“It’s been two and a half years. Not two and a half months. It’s been two and a half years of families reporting how sick they are,” she said at the CRI meeting. “If you all don’t know what it is, or haven’t figured it out, you have an obligation to warn these families. Where is the drinking water advisory?”

CRI members also noted that Navy policy states when a contaminant is unknown, officials should issue a public notification. They requested that the Navy provide alternate clean water sources to residents on its water line.

Causing further alarm and confusion, the EPA said last week that samples taken from a classroom sink and an Aliamanu Military Reservation home in March tested positive for TPH at levels higher than any other samples in the last two years. However, the EPA characterized those results as unvalidated and said validated results actually did not detect TPH. 

The Hawaii Department of Health is trying to figure out next steps. In an interview, Dennis Lopez, chief of the safe drinking water branch, said he isn’t sure how to square the test results and the community’s ongoing concerns. 

“The department wants the Navy to get to the bottom of what’s causing it,” Lopez said. “You cannot just leave people hanging.” 

Navy officials say they’ve assembled a “swarm team” of experts to investigate ongoing water problems. Despite requests from the community and Civil Beat, the Navy hasn’t published a list of the names and job titles of the team’s members. 

The health department has done some of its own limited testing, which could produce results by early April, Lopez said. Asked why DOH doesn’t conduct a full-scale independent investigation, Lopez gestured to three other health officials in the room, one of whom works for the EPA. 

“This is pretty much my only team, right in this room. They have a whole army,” he said. “We just don’t have the bandwidth. What we can do is the oversight part.”   

‘We Did The Best We Could At The Time’

After fuel leaked from the Navy’s Red Hill storage facility, Hawaii was faced with a unique challenge, Lopez said. 

Fuel is not a regulated contaminant, meaning the state and federal governments didn’t have set limits on what concentration in drinking water should be considered a cause for concern. Regulators had to come up with those on the spot, and fast, he said. 

“Here we are faced with a situation where we have to try and restore the system, remediate the system,” Lopez said. “And we have to come up with parameters.” 

They decided to use a variety of EPA-approved testing methods, one set typically aimed at identifying environmental contaminants – called 8000-series tests – and another tailored for enforcing regulated drinking water contaminants, called 500-series tests, according to Lopez. 

The plan covered TPH but also volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds known to be associated with fuel, Lopez said. It was designed to assess “multiple lines of evidence” to determine potential contamination, he said. Fuel isn’t just one substance. 

“It can be a large range of chemicals mixed up,” said Zhaohui Wong, DOH’s acting supervisor of drinking water compliance. 

The Navy used these methods to declare areas of Pearl Harbor’s drinking water safe, zone by zone, until all were deemed clean. And it continued to test under a two-year monitoring plan that was set to expire as of February of this year. All 8,000 samples underwent a variety of testing methods in the monitoring plan, Lopez said. 

For TPH, a limit was developed by Roger Brewer, a health department employee whose state job title is toxicologist but who is actually a trained geologist. Lopez said Brewer has gained experience with environmental hazards throughout his career. 

Brewer developed a risk assessment based on inhalation, ingestion and skin exposure to fuel, according to Lopez. At first he determined 211 parts per billion would be an appropriate threshold but after discovering a miscalculation, later increased it to 266 ppb, according to Lopez. Under the plan, exceeding that limit would require remediation.

But the plan had limitations. Notably, it didn’t include testing method 8270, an EPA-approved method that is designed to identify specific semi-volatile organic compounds in drinking water. 

“Keep in mind, it takes a lot of time. It’s really not an appropriate approach for an emergency response,” Lopez said of the 8270 method. “You can’t do the Cadillac tool in the middle of an emergency response. It’s going to be paralysis by analysis.” 

DOH did review some 8270 test results early on in the crisis, but nothing of interest showed up, Wong said. 

The department thought at the time that testing for TPH would cast a wide net for detecting problems. Wong said they expected to see its presence diminish over time, but that’s not what happened. 

“You can’t do the Cadillac tool in the middle of an emergency response. It’s going to be paralysis by analysis.” 

Dennis Lopez, chief of the Honolulu Department of Health safe drinking water branch

Moving forward, using method 8270 would be helpful, Lopez said. Today, regulators have a better understanding than they did two years ago of the fuel that leaked and the different compounds that could indicate contamination, he said. 

“This is also a learning curve for us,” Wong said. 

A new extended drinking water monitoring program is supposed to begin in April, but a copy of the plan, and what test methods it will include, has not been made public. Lopez said he didn’t know whether method 8270 will be part of that new plan. 

Still, the results DOH does have are puzzling. 

Some 12 billion gallons of water have been pumped through the Pearl Harbor distribution system. Lopez believes whatever contamination was present should’ve been flushed out.

An uptick in TPH detections wasn’t correlated with an increase in complaints from the public to DOH or the Navy, according to Lopez. 

Some complaints the Community Representation Initiative referred to DOH were not complaints at all, according to Melvin Tokuda, who supervises DOH’s safe drinking water monitoring section. Some people reached out not to report new health symptoms but rather because they were under the false impression that they could file a claim or sign up for some kind of health registry, he said. 

The Navy is still investigating the plumbing in some homes after some residents theorized that their water heaters could be contaminated, Lopez said. But water heaters could also become problematic if not kept hot enough, he noted. Those kept at temperatures below 120 degrees are at risk of bacterial growth, he said. 

Lopez acknowledged it’s possible there could be something in the water that science, as of now, doesn’t have the ability to detect. 

Going forward, there will be no more reliance on 266 ppb as an action level. Rather than focusing on exceedances of a specific number, the health department will be concerned about any positive detections, Lopez said. 

Li of the EPA said at the Community Representation Initiative meeting that the new plan will aim to “identify the actual makeup of what’s actually in the TPH mixture that we’re seeing.”

“Behind the scenes, we’re actually digging deeper than where we have been,” she said. “It’s going to take a little bit of time … Peeling back layers is what we’re invested in right now that maybe we hadn’t been before.”

Looking back, Lopez wishes officials knew more about TPH when they were developing their monitoring plan two years ago. 

“I think we did the best we could at the time,” he said. “If we were to have done this over again with another incident, we would take a more specific approach … We will definitely be more informed should this ever happen again.” 

To some community members, the response from public health officials is less than comforting.

“Whether it’s TPH, something else, a bacteria, whatever it is, it needs to be cleaned up and these people need to have clean water,” CRI member Walter Chun said at the meeting. “We get tied up in all the technicalities and all these numbers, but we miss the point of: What are you doing to help them?”

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation, Atherton Family Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.