The Department of Defense announced it will be shutting down the Navy’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii, months after discovering that it had been contaminating local residents’ drinking water.
Back in November, the facility was discovered to be the location of a massive fuel leak that contaminated thousands of people’s drinking water at the joint Pearl Harbor-Hickam Navy and Army base.
Roughly 6,000 people, many of whom lived in military housing on or near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, got sick from the water, while 4,000 military families were forced to leave their homes temporarily.
APPEALS COURT SIDES WITH NAVY SEALS SUING PENTAGON’S VACCINE MANDATE
“Throughout the process, we will work closely with the Hawaii Department of Health and with the Environmental Protection Agency to safely defuel the Red Hill facility,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement. “No later than May 31, the Secretary of the Navy and Director of the Defense Logistics Agency will provide an action plan for safe and expeditious defueling of the facility, with a completion date target of 12 months. Then, as soon as we have made corrective actions to ensure that defueling will be safe, we will begin defueling.”
“We will develop an environmental mitigation plan to address any future contamination concerns,” the secretary added.
Austin noted that the Red Hill facility, which is centrally located, “makes a lot less sense now” given that the “distributed and dynamic nature of our force posture in the Indo-Pacific, the sophisticated threats we face, and the technology available to us demand an equally advanced and resilient fueling capability.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Hawaii Gov. David Ige celebrated Austin’s decision, calling it “great news for the people of Hawaii. Our national defense begins with the health and safety of our people, and there are better solutions for strategic fueling today than there were when the Red Hill storage facility was built.”
