Harbor-area cleanup a major project
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
For more than 100 years, Honolulu Harbor and Iwilei businesses and agencies have been building an underground spaghetti plate of overlapping oil pipes and tanks, creating a corroded, leaking, gaseous maze of pollutants so complex that tracking where one system ends and another begins is a challenge likely to take years.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
Attempts to unravel the mess have begun, Department of Health Deputy Director Gary Gill said yesterday, and the question of who did what is less likely to be of interest to the state than efforts to make it right.
Gary Gill, deputy director of the state Health Department, looks out over a section of pavement at Pier 26 where state-contracted crews excavated a 30-by-50-foot hole to test the old, abandoned petroleum pipelines for leakage. Many of the pipelines found had not been indicated in the blueprint for the area.
A move to assess and correct the problems is under way by a dozen local businesses and the harbor division of the state Department of Transportation, which owns the harbor property. Members of the group, who call themselves the Honolulu Harbor Working Group, are acting voluntarily to deal with the pollution, making it unnecessary for state and federal agencies to force action under environmental protection laws.
The undertaking could take decades and will most likely cost well into the millions of dollars.
Gill and other Health Department officials called attention to the extent of the problem in the harbor area yesterday by holding a press conference over a section of pipes exposed when the group's contractor cut a 30-by-50-foot hole in the ground at Pier 26. The maze of rusting metal was impressive in its scope.
"There used to be a very casual attitude toward storing petroleum products," Gill said.
Documentation for some pipes and storage areas is missing or nonexistent, he said. Some pipes were added to remove products from a single vessel, then forgotten for decades with some of the petroleum left inside.
Beneath the soil of Iwilei, pushed inland by tidal actions, a layer of oil floats atop the groundwater, expanding slowly toward the mountains, Gill said.
Steve Calanog, the Environmental Protection Agency's on-scene coordinator, said occasional small "mystery seeps" of oil, reported now and then over the years in Honolulu Harbor, may have the underground contamination as their source.
Gases that can be petroleum pollution byproducts, including methane — which is flammable and explosive in enclosed areas —and benzene, which can cause cancer at high levels of exposure, have been discovered in small amounts in the area. Both Gill and Calanog said the gases were unlikely to pose a significant health threat at current levels.
Calanog said many industrialized cities throughout the country and the world are now realizing that pollution caused by petroleum products must be cleared. Hawai'i's efforts are unique only in the use of the volunteer group, as opposed to simply ordering the parties to comply.
Albert Chee, a spokesman for Chevron Hawai'i, one of the group members, said the oil company had participated in the group and encouraged others to do so because "it was the right thing to do."
Richard Mirikitani, senior vice president and corporate counsel for Castle & Cooke Hawai'i, said that in addition to corporate responsibility, cleanup is also good business. Industrial areas of an earlier time are popular sites for different types of development in this century, he said, citing Dole Cannery as an example.
In addition to Chevron, Castle & Cooke and the harbors division of the state Department of Transportation, members of the working group are BHP, City Mill, Dillingham Trust, Hawaiian Electric Co., Phillips Petroleum Co., Equilon Enterprises, Texaco, Tosco and Unocal.
Group members referred calls to their project coordinator, Mike Pietta of TRC, a Los Angeles-area environmental consulting company, but Pietta did not return telephone calls yesterday.
