The Honolulu Red Hill Fuel Spill, with Ernie Lau, Chief Engineer, Honolulu Board of Water Supply

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Ernie Lau from Honolulu Board of Water Supply. And the topic we're gonna talk about today is the Red Hill fuel spill in 2021.
[00:00:23] Piers Clark: Ernie, wonderful to have you with us.
[00:00:26] Ernie Lau: Thank you, Piers.
[00:00:27] Piers Clark: Now, we always start with learning a bit about the background of our interviewee. Can you just take me back, walk me through what you studied at university and what roles you've taken to get to the role that you are in today?
[00:00:39] Ernie Lau: I was born and raised on the island of O'ahu, one of the main Hawaiian islands of the state of Hawaii.
[00:00:45] Ernie Lau: I went to public school, not a private school product here. Went to the University of Hawaii, which is the state university where I majored in engineering.
[00:00:53] Piers Clark: And where did you go from there? So you came out of university, did you go straight into the Honolulu Board of Water Supply?
[00:00:59] Ernie Lau: I spent a little bit of time in construction when jobs were hard to find for engineers when I graduated, and then eventually made it over. And I have been on and off with the Board of Water Supply since 1980.
[00:01:11] Piers Clark: And so you are 45 years in Honolulu Board of Water Supply and the role you are in today?
[00:01:17] Ernie Lau: Actually, it's not 45 with the Board of Water Supply but like anything else, life's journey took me to different jobs and always in the public sector though.
[00:01:26] Ernie Lau: And I came back to the Board of Water Supply in 2012 and have been honored to serve as manager and chief engineer since then.
[00:01:33] Piers Clark: Excellent. Now let's talk about the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. How many people do you serve? And you are obviously based in Honolulu, but give me some facts about the assets that you've got.
[00:01:44] Ernie Lau: Honolulu Board of Water Supply was created actually in 1929. We're part of city government, but we are what they call semi-autonomous. So I have a seven member board of directors. They have full authority over raising rates, setting policy, long-term plans, and hiring the manager. So we operate like a real utility. We have all aspects of the business functions of utility.
[00:02:07] Ernie Lau: We serve about almost a million people every day on this island, residents and visitors. On average, we have to produce about 145 million gallons a day. We're 100% dependent on groundwater. So underground aquifers are critically important to our utility and to this island of O'ahu.
[00:02:24] Piers Clark: Okay. So unlike many other nation states which have backed up resources of desalination, plants or reservoirs, you are 100% dependent upon groundwater. That of course makes the topic we are going to talk about today, particularly pertinent because the story you are going to tell is around a catastrophic fuel spill that happened in 2021 in some massive tanks that were storing jet fuel. For the US armed forces.
[00:02:51] Piers Clark: Now, I wanna start by asking about what were you doing when you first heard about the problem? When did the message come through to you that there'd been a catastrophic leak in these fuel tanks?
[00:03:02] Ernie Lau: We go back about 11 years to January 13th, 2014, we get a phone call from our local Department of Health. They regulate drinking water, and they called us around lunchtime, noon, that there had been a fuel leak from underground storage tanks at Red Hill.
[00:03:18] Ernie Lau: My first reaction is Red Hill. What's that? Because that was the first time I heard about this facility. So that was the beginning of this long journey that's taken us to the present and we're still dealing with the situation.
[00:03:30] Piers Clark: Some people might have in their minds that this is a tiny, above ground, medium-sized sort of facility, but that is not what we're talking about here.
[00:03:38] Piers Clark: Can you give us a sense of scale and tell exactly where these tanks are relative to the locations of your aquifers?
[00:03:45] Ernie Lau: People are pretty familiar with underground storage tanks. If you go out to the petrol station or the gas station, they have underground storage tanks. There maybe 3000 gallons or 5,000 gallon tanks.
[00:03:57] Ernie Lau: The Red Hill fuel storage facility constructed by the US Navy in 1940 contains 20 underground storage tanks constructed in place by hollowing out a mountain ridge and building vertical tanks that are 250 feet tall, 100 feet in diameter, and each tank can hold about 12 and a half million gallons of fuel.
[00:04:19] Ernie Lau: And there's about 20 of these fuel tanks underground.
[00:04:23] Piers Clark: For a sense of scale, a typical forecourt petrol gas station might have a 5,000 gallon tank, but for Red Hill we are talking about 20 tanks, which have 12 and a half million gallons each thousand of times the capacity. Is that correct?
[00:04:40] Ernie Lau: That's correct, Piers. These are massive tanks. The Navy used the analogy of the Statue of Liberty in New York could actually fit in one of these tanks and there are 20 of these tanks. The bottoms of the tanks are only a hundred feet above the underground groundwater aquifer that we pump from that both the navy and the border of water supply utilize to supply our community with drinking water.
[00:05:02] Piers Clark: Okay, so I've got it. You've got a mountain. Someone's done a massive engineering to build these big tanks. They put the tanks inside there, they're sitting above the aquifer. And of course, the geology that you are dealing with is larval rock. It is porous. It has the ability to transmit fluids, correct.
[00:05:20] Ernie Lau: Yes, exactly correct.
[00:05:21] Ernie Lau: We have abundant supplies of fresh groundwater in these underground aquifers. That's actually a blessing that we have on this island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But the volcanic rock is very porous. It's fractured, it's very heterogeneous. It's not like a homogeneous or uniform, gravel base aquifer.
[00:05:39] Ernie Lau: This is a highly complex underground geologic situation, so fuel leaking outta these tanks can get into this environment and you're not sure where that fuel might end up. Eventually it will get pulled by gravity and flow with the groundwater underneath the tanks.
[00:05:55] Ernie Lau: When the fuel tanks were constructed over 80 years ago by the US Navy, they also knew that below the tanks there was a vital fresh water aquifer there because they also built their drinking water source to serve Pearl Harbor in the same complex where the fuel tanks were located.
[00:06:12] Piers Clark: It's incredible that the first time that this massive facility appeared on your radar was when a leak was reported. And I assume that's because it being a military installation, there was a certain degree of secrecy and non-disclosure?
[00:06:25] Ernie Lau: Yes. It was initially classified and was only declassified actually in the mid 1990s.
[00:06:31] Ernie Lau: For the most part, they kept it very secret even after it was declassified. I think the regulators knew about it and had regulatory authority over this underground storage tanks. For the rest of the community and for myself, the first surprise came on January 13th, 2014.
[00:06:48] Piers Clark: I'd actually wish for this story to be one where there was a small leak in January, 2014. People found it, they realized the risk and changed their practices so that there wouldn't be a problem later on.
[00:07:02] Piers Clark: But sadly, I know that that's not the case. And that incident that happened in 2014 was just the start. This ticking time bomb did indeed have a much larger leak a few years later. So let's jump forward to 2021.
[00:07:18] Piers Clark: Where were you when you heard that news? Was this the second incident or had there been any between it?
[00:07:23] Ernie Lau: I believe there were other incidents in between that, but then it was the November, 2021 leak that actually contaminated their drinking water source at the Red Hill facility. It started on a Sunday afternoon, and in the US we celebrate Thanksgiving every November.
[00:07:42] Ernie Lau: Just after Thanksgiving celebrations, our control center where we operate the water system, and we monitor 24/7. I started to receive calls from people complaining that water coming out of their faucets in their homes smelled like gasoline, smelled like fuel. That afternoon, my information officer, Kathleen Pahinui, gave me a call and said, we're getting these complaints.
[00:08:04] Ernie Lau: And I was thinking, is this our Board of Water supply customers or the Navy's customers? Because the Navy operates a separate water system serving  Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, , and it turned out to be only the people that were served by that system started to complain about health effects. I actually saw one video where somebody put a match to the water coming out their kitchen sink faucet, and it flamed.
[00:08:29] Ernie Lau: This was a crisis that unfortunately happened in 2021 and about 93,000 people that live and work at  Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam were impacted by fuel contaminated drinking water.
[00:08:42] Piers Clark: Good Lord. And in November, 2021, we're actually still in the middle of the pandemic. So I assume that there's a whole layer of other restrictions that are in place at the time.
[00:08:53] Ernie Lau: That is correct. And we're dealing now with two crisis, the pandemic itself, which was unprecedented global pandemic. Now with a water system serving over 90,000 people being contaminated with fuel.
[00:09:07] Ernie Lau: It turned out to be a very difficult time because a number of those people had to actually be evacuated from the base housing. I think they occupied around a thousand hotel rooms in Waikiki and spent the remainder of the year, Christmas and New Year's in hotel rooms before they could return to the base.
[00:09:25] Piers Clark: Lots of people will be listening to this and will be imagining what they would do in those circumstances. Here you are, you've already had a warning shot across the bowels of a leak.
[00:09:35] Piers Clark: Now there's a massive leak that's happening at a time when you've got a pandemic, you know that your watercourse is going to be contaminated. The question is, when and where? Where's that contamination going to appear? Because, as you said, the flow of water through the mountain geography is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty.
[00:09:53] Piers Clark: So what happened? Where are we today? What did the Navy do? Did they finally empty the tanks? And are you now waiting for this ticking bomb to appear or has it already appeared?
[00:10:05] Ernie Lau: The Navy has full responsibility for the mess they created and they knew they were getting into this situation. Where we are today is that we had to shut down three wells as a prudent measure to prevent further migration of the contaminants in the underground aquifer across the valley 'cause our wells are located across the valley, maybe about a mile to the west of the Red Hill fuel tanks.
[00:10:29] Ernie Lau: So we've had three wells shut down. We've had to pump other wells harder to make up the loss capacity, and this is for the water system serving urban Honolulu and also the IA Haua system, which is a smaller system.
[00:10:43] Ernie Lau: It's still impacting us and we're starting to now detect more contaminants in monitor wells and in also those wells that are shut down too.
[00:10:52] Piers Clark: And if I was being simplistic, you might find that there'll be this wave of pollution that will come through that will eventually attenuate down and maybe in five decades time or 50 decades time, it will have flushed through the system and the original wells might be back to being used. Is that a reasonable assumption or am I being naive there?
[00:11:12] Ernie Lau: I think Piers, you're pointing out the uncertainty of what's happening deep hundreds of feet underground in the porous volcanic rock and the fractures and crevices and pore spaces that are volcanic rock.
[00:11:26] Ernie Lau: What'll happen over time? That uncertainty, it's gonna be hanging over our heads, like a ticking time bomb that we have to deal with. Someday in the future, we'll see morbid show up at a particular well, we'll wonder where is it coming from, but it could have originated from the Red Hill facility.
[00:11:42] Ernie Lau: So remember, this Red Hill facility has been in operation for about 80 years before the decision to shut it down and empty it. When they emptied the tanks because of the 2021 event, they actually removed the 104.7 million gallons of fuel that was sitting right above our aquifer in the Red Hill area.
[00:12:02] Ernie Lau: Now we're dealing with the aftermath of past leaks over its 80 year history. The recent leak that occurred in May and November of 2021, and trying to figure out where is it located in the environment, in the unsaturated rock below the bottoms of the tanks and above the water table of the aquifer. What's ever dissolved into the aquifer? Where's it moving? Can it be cleaned up or remediated to contain this contamination as migration off of Navy property to potentially other wells, especially the wells of the Board of Water Supply.
[00:12:35] Piers Clark: Now, with the benefit of hindsight, is there something you wish you'd done or known earlier, back in 2013?
[00:12:42] Piers Clark: Is there an action now that you look back and think, God, if I'd known how this was gonna play out, I would've done such and such?
[00:12:48] Ernie Lau: It troubles me, Piers, because hindsight is always 2020 and we all wish we had the benefit of going back in time. So if I could look back and say, what would I do differently from the first time?
[00:12:59] Ernie Lau: I was informed in January of 2014 about that leak of 27,000 gallons. I was trying to work with the Navy and said that they need to either double wall these tanks, they need to completely reconstruct them or shut it down.
[00:13:14] Ernie Lau: And I guess if I looked at what happened in 2021. I think I should have been much more aggressive because real people got injured by the contaminated water that they had to be exposed to, and those effects are still being felt by some of these people.
[00:13:29] Piers Clark: I love the fact that you have such humility there to talk about their hindsight, but I also think just hearing you tell the story, the citizens of Honolulu are incredibly lucky to have someone like you with their calm engineering foresight to shut down those wells to preserve their water supply. I'm in awe of how you've helped to handle this catastrophe.
[00:13:51] Ernie Lau: Thank you, Piers.
[00:13:52] Piers Clark: Now we always finish with a slightly cheeky question, and the cheeky question I'm gonna ask you is to go back to the 1980s and imagine that you are able to talk to a young Ernie Lau. What advice would you give him?
[00:14:06] Ernie Lau: We all have a purpose in life, and you never know what that purpose is until someday it shows up on your doorstep.
[00:14:12] Ernie Lau: So I would say hang in there. Don't get discouraged. Continue to do the best you can for the community. Protect the water resources with your life. We say here,  Olaikavai" – "Water is Life". And on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, freshwater resources are as precious as gold. So treat it as a gift and advocate for its protection.
[00:14:36] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me Piers Clark, and my spectacular guest today has been Ernie Lau of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, and we've been talking about the Red Hill field spill of both 2014 and 2021.
[00:14:53] Piers Clark: I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.