In Hawaii trial, Navy fights claim of ongoing fuel spill risk

Activists argue Navy mismanagement still threatens Pearl Harbor with fuel discharges, while officials say past spills ended and sweeping fixes have made recurrence unlikely.

by Jeremy Yurow, Court House News, March 31, 2026

HONOLULU (CN) — A coalition of Native Hawaiian leaders and environmental advocates squared off against the U.S. Navy in federal court Tuesday, opening a bench trial over whether the military has been discharging petroleum into Pearl Harbor for years and whether it is likely to do so again.

The case has its roots in one of the worst environmental disasters in Hawaii’s history.

The Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility is a World War II-era complex of 20 underground tanks mined into a volcanic ridge above Honolulu. Built in the early 1940s to protect the Navy’s Pacific fuel supply from aerial attack, each tank stands roughly 250 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Together, they can hold more than 250 million gallons of fuel.

The facility sits just 100 feet above an aquifer that supplies drinking water to a majority of Oahu.

On November 20, 2021, a fuel pipe inside Red Hill ruptured. About 20,000 gallons of jet fuel spewed for 21 hours into 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 ultimately showed petroleum contamination at 350 times the safe drinking water threshold. Roughly 4,000 military families were evacuated to hotels, and about 93,000 people served by the Navy’s water system were affected.

The Hawaii Department of Health ordered the Navy to shut down and defuel Red Hill. After initially contesting that order, the Navy agreed to permanently close the facility. Defueling has since been completed, though cleanup of contaminated groundwater is expected to take decades.

Wai Ola Alliance’s lawsuit, filed in June 2022, does not target the Red Hill tanks directly. Instead, it focuses on a network of above-ground fuel pipelines at harbor piers, including Hotel Pier and Kilo Pier, that carry petroleum from Red Hill to ships and aircraft.

The plaintiffs say the Navy discharged petroleum from those pipelines into Pearl Harbor and Halawa Stream in violation of the Clean Water Act and management failures behind those discharges remain unchanged today.

They are seeking daily civil penalties of roughly $60,000 per violation going back years, along with a court order that could reshape how the Navy manages fuel operations at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi, a Barack Obama appointee, is presiding without a jury.

Plaintiff attorney Daniel Cooper argued 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 the fueling infrastructure is split among at least five separate federal entities operating in different command structures, while project tracking is spread across at least seven different databases. As a result, he said, critical repairs have been deferred for years.

He pointed to two examples.

Thermal pressure relief valves were shown in inspection reports going back to 2010 to be leaking, absent, or improperly installed, Cooper said. Navy documents also identified 70 pipelines with no thermal pressure relief at all, according to Cooper.

He also described petroleum pipes near a truck refueling 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 project tracking and management failures and the risk of discharge,” Cooper said. “If that’s true, then the Navy wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a catch-up effort.”

Cooper asked the court to order the immediate replacement of nearly 100 thermal relief valves, restrictions on fueling at certain piers until repairs are complete, 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 Department of Justice acknowledged the pier discharges occurred but argued they ended well before the lawsuit was filed. The Clean Water Act, he said, does not permit citizen suits over past violations.

“The Navy discharged fuel from a defuel line at Hotel Pier in 2020 and 2021, and from an active fuel line at Kilo Pier in 2021,” Hardee said. “But those discharges ended nearly a year before the plaintiffs filed this lawsuit.”

Hardee said the Navy had already isolated the offending pipelines before the case was filed, has spent years and tens of millions of dollars improving 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 central 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 petroleum management, environmental remediation and environmental damages.

The Navy immediately moved to disqualify him.

Hardee walked Rogers through a series of admissions: no engineering degree, no engineering certifications, 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 West Texas A&M University, correct?” Hardee asked.

“As a professor, and I also have an environmental consulting firm,” Rogers said.

Kobayashi questioned Rogers directly about his corrosion background. Rogers described three years of corrosion research at the Petrolite Corporation after earning his doctorate, consulting work on oil production facilities in the Permian Basin and Louisiana, and World Bank work reviewing petroleum infrastructure in the former Soviet republics in the 1990s.

Kobayashi accepted him as an expert in petroleum management over the Navy’s objection.

Rogers then testified about conditions he observed during a 2024 site inspection at the Joint Base, displaying photographs of corroded pipe flanges and fuel lines sitting without secondary containment, meaning no physical barrier to prevent a spill from reaching the harbor.

“The only comparison I’d have would be to abandoned or basically retired sites,” Rogers said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in an active site.”

The Navy challenged the photographs on grounds of hearsay, best evidence, and lack of foundation. Kobayashi overruled most objections but admitted the photos without their captions.

Rogers acknowledged he could not identify which specific pier some photographs were taken at because, he said, the Navy had stripped geolocation data from the images over security concerns.

Rogers also testified that when he and an assistant attempted to trace Navy maintenance and repair orders through completion using the Navy’s own databases, a significant portion could not be confirmed as finished.

“There’s no documentation for completion,” he said. “In my world, if it’s not documented, it wasn’t completed.”

Asked why weekly meetings between Navy units would not be sufficient to address the problem, Rogers said meetings alone are not enough without documented follow-through.

“Meetings don’t really accomplish much unless you document and schedule the results of those meetings,” he said.

The trial is expected to continue for several more days.

The Navy plans to call 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.