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State reports progress State health officials said yesterday they are making progress in their search for petroleum leaking into Honolulu Harbor.
on harbor oil problems
A number of leaking pipes have
now been drained, officials sayBy Diana Leone
dleone@starbulletin.comGary Gill, deputy director of environmental health, pointed to a gaping hole in the parking lot of Pier 26, filled with a maze of rusty old pipes, from which 600 gallons of oil was removed several weeks ago.
"It looks like dinosaur bones to me," he said. "This is a real graphic indication of the progress we're making in the area."
The Health Department and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are overseeing work to find the source of ongoing oil leakage into Honolulu Harbor. The work is being funded by Honolulu Harbor Participating Parties, a group of landowners in the area who are pooling resources to find and remove the underground pollution -- so they will not face up to $25,000 a day in Clean Water Act fines.
Gill told reporters at a news conference yesterday at the site that 13 pipes have been cut and filled with concrete in this section alone. "Some of these pipes have been here the better part of a century. It's very important that we remove any standing oil so we don't have to continually go back and clean."
So far, the contractors have drilled 150 sampling wells and 21 monitor wells and have taken 500 soil samples and 100 groundwater samples, Gill said. Those samples will be analyzed and a plan developed based on the results next year.
Keith Kawaoka, a Health Department project manager, estimated that up to $1 million has been spent by the landowners for sampling so far, "but they have a way to go yet."
Health Director Bruce Anderson has said in the past that the total cleanup could take millions.
"It's going to cost whatever it costs to get it done, and the responsible parties are going to pay for it," Gill said yesterday.
After this week's heavy rains, Gill said, "the good news is, we didn't detect any oil sheen in the harbor. That indicates the previous work we've done already seems to be working."
It only takes a tiny amount of oil to create a sheen -- and a sheen is sufficient for there to be pollution concerns, he said. From a regulation standpoint, any sheen is a violation of the Clean Water Act and potentially could mean a fine of up to $25,000 a day.
The state has been concerned about the area since at least the 1970s, Gill said.
"This is one of the more complex cleanup cases in the nation," he said.
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