HONOLULU (CN) – A coalition of Native Hawaiian leaders and environmental advocates countered the U.S. Navy in federal court Tuesday, opening a bench trial whether the military has been dumping oil at Pearl Harbor for years and whether it is likely to do so again.
The case is rooted in one of the worst environmental disasters in Hawaii’s history.
The Red Hill Fuel Storage Facility is a World War II-era complex of 20 underground tanks mined on a volcanic ridge above Honolulu. Built in the early 1940s to protect the Navy’s fuel supply in the Pacific from air attack, each tank is approximately 250 feet long and 100 feet wide. Together, they can hold more than 250 million liters of fuel.
The facility sits just 100 feet above an aquifer that supplies drinking water to most of Oahu.
On November 20, 2021, a fuel pipe inside Kodra e Quqe ruptured. Around 20,000 gallons of jet fuel jumped for 21 hours in a tunnel near the Navy’s main drinking water well. Workers initially thought there was no threat to the water supply. They were wrong.
Within days, residents in military housing near Pearl Harbor reported a fuel-like odor from their kitchen and bathroom faucets. Water samples from the Red Hill shaft eventually showed oil contamination at 350 times the safe drinking water threshold. About 4,000 military families were evacuated to hotels and ca 93,000 people served by the Navy’s water system were affected.
The Hawaii Department of Health ordered the Navy to close and unload the Red Hill fuel. After initially objecting to that order, the Navy agreed to permanently close the facility. The burning of the fuels has since ended, although cleanup of the contaminated groundwater is expected to take decades.
The Wai Ola Alliance lawsuit, filed in June 2022, does not directly target the Red Hill tanks. Instead, it focuses on a network of above-ground fuel pipelines at the port’s piers, including Hotel Pier and Kilo Pier, that transport oil from Red Hill to ships and aircraft.
The plaintiffs say the Navy discharged oil from those pipelines into Pearl Harbor and Halawa Stream in violation of the Clean Water Act, and the management failures behind those discharges remain unchanged today.
They are seeking daily civil penalties of about $60,000 for violations dating back years, along with a court order that could reshape how the Navy manages refueling operations at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
US District Judge Leslie Kobayashi, appointed by Barack Obama, is presiding without a jury.
Plaintiff’s attorney Daniel Cooper argued that the Navy is disorganized and has mismanaged its fuel systems.
“When everyone is in charge, no one is in charge,” he said.
Cooper said responsibility for fuel infrastructure is divided among at least five separate federal entities operating under different command structures, while project tracking is spread across at least seven different databases. As a result, he said, critical repairs have been delayed for years.
He gave two examples.
Thermal pressure relief valves were shown in inspection reports since 2010 to be leaking, missing or improperly installed, Cooper said. Navy documents also identified 70 pipelines with no thermal pressure relief at all, according to Cooper.
He also described oil pipelines near a truck gas station that were observed sitting directly in the dirt in 2015, again in 2022 and again when the plaintiffs’ expert visited in 2024.
“The Navy argues that Wai Ola cannot show any link between the project’s pursuit and management failures and the risk of discharge,” Cooper said. “If that’s true, then the Navy spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to catch up.”
Cooper asked the court to order the immediate replacement of about 100 thermal relief valves, restrictions on fueling at certain piers until repairs are completed and the creation of a single, centralized maintenance database overseen by the base commander.
“A single point of compliance, centralized command,” he said.
Navy attorney Alex Hardee of the Justice Department acknowledged that the dock discharges occurred, but argued that they ended long before the lawsuit was filed. The Clean Water Act, he said, does not allow for lawsuits against citizens for past violations.
“The Navy unloaded fuel from a discharge line at Hotel Pier in 2020 and 2021, and from an active fuel line at Kilo Pier in 2021,” Hardee said. “But those dismissals were completed nearly a year before the plaintiffs filed this lawsuit.”
Hardee said the Navy had already isolated the offending pipelines before the case arose, has spent years and tens of millions of dollars to improve its operations and now runs a different facility than it did in 2021.
The trial moved quickly from opening statements to testimony.
The day’s key witness was William Rogers, a professor at West Texas A&M University with a doctorate in wildlife and fisheries sciences, offered by the plaintiffs as an expert in oil management, environmental remediation and environmental damage.
The Navy immediately moved to disqualify him.
Hardee passed Rogers on a series of admissions: no engineering degree, no engineering certificates, and no hands-on work at a petrochemical facility since the late 1970s.
“Since 1997, your full-time job has been as a professor at Texas A&M University West, correct?” Hardy asked.
“As a professor, and I also have an environmental consulting firm,” Rogers said.
Kobayashi asked Rogers directly about his corrosion background. Rogers described three years of corrosion research at Petrolite Corporation after earning his doctorate, consulting work at oil production facilities in the Permian Basin and Louisiana and World Bank work reviewing oil infrastructure in former Soviet republics in the 1990s.
Kobayashi accepted him as an expert in oil management over the Navy’s objection.
Rogers then testified about the conditions he observed during a 2024 site inspection at the joint base, showing photos of corroded pipe flanges and fuel lines sitting with no secondary containment, meaning no physical barrier to prevent a spill from reaching the port.
“The only comparison I would have would be to abandoned or mostly retired sites,” Rogers said. “I’ve never seen anything like this on an active site.”
The Navy challenged the photos based on hearsay, best evidence and lack of foundation. Kobayashi dismissed most of the objections but accepted the photos without their captions.
Rogers acknowledged that he could not identify which specific pier some photos were taken on because, he said, the Navy had removed geolocation data from the images for security concerns.
Rogers also testified that when he and an assistant tried to track Navy maintenance and repair orders to completion using Navy databases, a significant portion could not be confirmed as completed.
“There is no documentation to complete,” he said. “In my world, if it’s not documented, it’s not done.”
Asked why weekly meetings between Navy units would not be enough to address the problem, Rogers said meetings alone are not enough without documented follow-up.
“Meetings don’t accomplish much unless you document and plan the results of those meetings,” he said.
The trial is expected to continue for several days.
The Navy plans to call in an engineering contractor who spent three years working with the Navy on safety improvements after the 2021 spill, and a structural engineer who conducted a recent physical inspection of the facility and is expected to testify that no ongoing release exists and that recurrence is not reasonably likely.
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