A grand jury has indicted two civilian workers on charges they caused the Navy to provide the Hawaii Department of Health with false information about jet fuel that spilled from a Pearl Harbor storage facility before it later seeped into drinking water and sickened 6,000 people over Thanksgiving in 2021.
The indictments are the first to result from the fuel spill that angered Hawaii residents, lawmakers and military service members and their families. The military decided to close the aging World War II-era fuel tanks after the spill.
The day after the spill, the Navy issued a press release about the incident and told the 8,400 families living in military housing, “the water remains safe to drink,” even though the Navy had not tested the water yet.
A Navy investigation in 2022 found shoddy management and human error caused the leak at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility. The Defense Department’s inspector general last year found Navy officials lacked sufficient understanding of the risks of maintaining massive fuel storage tanks on top of a Pearl Harbor drinking water well. The Navy issued written reprimands to three retired military officers for their roles in the fuel spill.
The indictment returned Thursday alleges John Floyd and Nelson Wu provided the Navy with inaccurate information about a May 2021 spill that occurred six months before the fuel got in the drinking water. The indictment says they caused the Navy to mislead the Hawaii Department of Health about how much fuel leaked from one of the tanks and reassured officers that their information was accurate.
This caused the Navy to tell the department in the months after May that 1,618 gallons leaked instead of 20,000 gallons and failed to report that it was unable to find 18,000 gallons, prosecutors say. The indictment alleges Floyd and Wu redacted data from records provided. Floyd and Wu were each indicted on one count of conspiracy and one count of making false statements.
Floyd was the Fuels Department deputy director at Red Hill while Wu was the Fuels Department supervisory engineer.
The federal public defender’s office, which is representing Floyd, didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Wu’s attorney, Alen Kaneshiro, said he didn’t have a comment at this time.
The Navy’s investigation found fuel gushed from a ruptured pipe on May 6, 2021. Most of it flowed into a fire suppression drain system, where it sat unnoticed for six months until a cart rammed a sagging line holding the liquid and caused fuel to pour out. Crews believed they mopped up most of this fuel, but they failed to get it all and some flowed into a drain and drinking water well that supplied water to 90,000 people at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Wayne Tanaka, the director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, said culpability extended beyond the alleged actions of the two civilians. He said in a statement the Navy’s own investigation showed officials knew some 20,000 gallons were unaccounted for after the May incident and yet it didn’t inform the community or regulators. He said Navy leaders sidelined a whistleblower who sounded alarms about the mismanagement of Red Hill.
A 4-year-old girl was one of thousands exposed to the contaminated water.
She woke up with a cough that never went away 13 days after the water was contaminated, said her mom, Brittany Traeger. Now she gets hour-long nebulizer treatments for her respiratory problems and, at least twice a day, the girl wears a vibrating vest to clear her lungs. Her parents are among 2,000 military families suing the government, alleging they were harmed by negligence at Red Hill.
“There’s a body of government that failed,” Traeger said. “They contaminated our water, they lied to us, they did not protect us, and they did not intervene.”
Fuel leaks at Red Hill had occurred before, including in 2014, prompting the Sierra Club of Hawaii and the Honolulu Board of Water Supply to ask the military to move the tanks to a place where they wouldn’t threaten Oahu’s water. But the Navy refused, saying the island’s water was safe.
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