“Spitting in Our Faces” Sierra Club of Hawaii Statement on the EPA and Navy Decision to Muzzle the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative
We’ll analyze the fate of the Community Representation Initiative, followed by a re-printing of the Sierra Club’s recent press release.
By Pat Elder
November 24, 2024
Earlier this year, the Navy completed its defueling mission, bowing to the demands of the community. The Navy says it is focused on closing the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility and cleaning up the contamination it has caused. We’ll see about that.
On November 20, 2021, a massive spill of jet fuel inside an underground access tunnel contaminated the drinking water of 93,000 military personnel and their dependents at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Navy failed to alert residents until thousands reported symptoms such as body rashes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, migraines, and lethargy. Even then, the Navy waited until December 2, a full 12 days after the spill, to admit they poisoned the water. According to the Navy, of the 93,000 people affected by the spill, 27,797 sought medical care within the military health system in the incident's immediate aftermath.
Many are still sick. The community was outraged because for years many had been calling for the closure of the fuel facility that contained 250 million gallons of fuel and is situated a mere 100 feet above the island’s drinking water aquifer.
The Navy was hoping the issue would die down, the way environmental disasters they cause typically quiet down after a couple of weeks. Time is always on their side in the absence of the media.
The community was outraged and quickly intensified their already well-organized resistance. Unlike most Navy towns, they were fortunate to be served by local print and television media that aggressively covered the story and quickly refuted the Navy’s numerous false statements.
The Navy was against the wall. It is always concerned about insurrection, even at home. They recognize deadly contamination as their Achilles Heal. Rather than coming clean, they turned to propagandistic tactics that have proven helpful in similar situations worldwide. Their plans backfired with the establishment of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative, (CRI).
The Pentagon likes to identify their chief civilian adversaries, encounter them, isolate them, denigrate them, and cause dissension in their ranks. It didn’t work in Hawaii because of great civic leaders like Marti Townsend, Healani Sonoda-Pale, Ernie Lau, Wayne Tanaka, Melodie Aduja, and Mandy Feindt. This is an extraordinarily sophisticated citizen group!
Hawaii is different culturally and historically from the mainland, a distinction lost on the Navy with its short-term admirals shuffled in and out every few years.
“They’ve done so much damage that it will take years, decades to heal from what they’ve done to us,” Healani Sonoda-Pale, an organizer with the Oʻahu Water Protectors, explained to Yes Magazine. “And when I say ‘us,’ I’m talking about the Indigenous peoples of this land who have been under U.S. rule since 1893. As the first peoples of Hawaiʻi, we are the voice of the land, the voice of our water, and our nonhuman relatives. What happens to them happens to us and vice versa.”
The Navy turned to the EPA, a trusted “partner” when things got too hot to handle.
The DOD dictates environmental policy in these matters. The EPA is on the sidelines, although sometimes it is asked to participate as a partisan referee of sorts.
The Red Hill Community Representation Initiative was created as part of a 2023 federal consent order regarding the closure of Red Hill. It was established “to provide a platform for community members to directly engage with the Navy, Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding the defueling and closure of the Red Hill Underground Bulk Fuel Storage Facility.”
Ten CRI members were to fill four categories: 1) Impacted Residents, 2) O’ahu Residents, 3) Community-Based Organizations, and 4) Native Hawaiian Interests.
The arrangement was destined to fail when representatives from the Navy, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the EPA sat down with the ten members of the community. The Navy is armed with an arsenal of manipulative tricks, but they didn’t work on this well-informed, expertly organized community collective of ten. These agitated folks had a host of unmet demands and unanswered questions. They weren’t about to give in to strong-armed tactics.
The Navy interacts with communities across the country through Restoration Advisory Boards (RAB’s) and various versions of town hall meetings where they set the agenda and screen questions. That’s how they roll. The CRI would have none of it.
Right away the Navy fought with the community representatives over who was in charge. At one point the Navy published its own agenda without the input of the community members. CRI members said that the Navy had published a false agenda and a list of expectations for the operation of the CRI, along with an unauthorized CRI website. The Navy and the DLA stopped attending. The CRI continues to hold regular meetings without them.
Now, the EPA, acting on the Navy’s behalf, is working to pull the plug on the CRI.
Let’s read the November 22, 2024 press release from The Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi executive director Wayne Tanaka..
CONTACT: Wayne Tanaka, wayne.tanaka@sierraclub.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, November 22, 2024
“Spitting in Our Faces”: Sierra Club Statement on the EPA and Navy Decision to Muzzle the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative
HONOLULU, HAWAI’I – The Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi executive director Wayne Chung Tanaka today issued the following statement regarding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) and Navy’s decision, announced yesterday, to severely limit the work of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative (CRI) originally established under their 2023 Administrative Consent Order:
“Just last week, the Department of Defense Inspector General released three damning reports confirming the Navy’s leadership culture of carelessness, hubris, and state of denial that led to the Red Hill water crisis and that persists to this day.
Now, we have been informed that the EPA has agreed with this same institutional culprit to strip away almost all of the powers of the Red Hill CRI, which for over a year has been a leading voice for transparency and accountability, and served as the one forum that poisoned families and Hawai‘i residents have been able to rely upon, to raise questions and demand answers regardless of how inconvenient the Navy may find such matters.
The EPA’s nickel and diming of the Red Hill CRI’s limited powers, beginning with its refusal to enforce Navy officials’ attendance requirements, to its refusal to support requests for alternative drinking water sources for Navy water consumers after dozens of health and water quality complaints, to its failed attempts to disband the CRI, has now culminated in an agreement to impose final lame duck ‘ground rules’ for the CRI that are, quite frankly, akin to spitting in our faces:
Navy officials will now be able to unilaterally dictate what items are able to be discussed by the CRI and what questions may be asked of them, with no conflict resolution or review process to address clearly arbitrary and erroneous decisions on their part.
Members of the public will be given only 30 minutes every three months to raise their concerns with the CRI, whose members will be forced to act as brick walls - forbidden from even responding to the most egregious situations and pressing questions that may be raised.
And the CRI will be forbidden from addressing any matter, no matter how dire or concerning, that occurs less than three weeks before a scheduled CRI meeting.
That these amendments were made with no opportunity for public review or input – after nearly 2,000 written comments and hours of oral testimony were shared with the EPA regarding their original, toothless draft 2023 Administrative Consent Order - also makes clear the EPA’s and Navy’s obvious disregard for the Hawai‘i community at large, as well as the service members and families whose lives were upended by the Navy’s malfeasance.
The Sierra Club of Hawai‘i reiterates its call for our local leaders and Congressional Delegation to stand with and for the community, and to demand that the EPA and Navy undo this outrageous attempt to silence the Red Hill CRI and by extension, all who have been affected or remain under threat by the Navy’s poisoning of our most precious resource.”
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