Posted on: Monday, June 28, 2004

HAWAI'I'S ENVIRONMENT
Cleanup of '03 oil spill continues

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Columnist

Engineers say they have recovered most of the oil from a massive fuel spill early last year at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, although it's unlikely they will be able to get it all.

Nearly 100,000 gallons of jet fuel known as JP5 leaked from an underground pipeline on Midway's Sand Island in early February 2003. The spill is blamed on a corroded pipeline fitting that failed due to dissimilar metals being in contact with each other on the fitting.

Crews immediately began digging pits and pumping out fuel that was floating on the groundwater. Later, wells with air-powered pumps were installed around the spill site, sucking the fuel and water into a big above-ground separation tank.

The recovered fuel is burned in an incinerator installed for the purpose. The incinerator also burns the atoll's waste motor oil and is used to destroy the carcasses of dead seabirds and to incinerate wet trash, reducing the amount of material that goes into the island's landfill.

Oil-contaminated soil that was excavated during the recovery process is stored on a concrete platform, where natural oil-eating bacteria and evaporation are being allowed to remove the light oil.

As of early June, the pumping project had brought up 74,000 gallons of fuel. The recovery rate was more than 1,000 gallons a day at the start, but it has dropped off to 8 to 10 gallons daily, said Joey Hickey, Portland, Ore.-based project engineer with GeoEngineers, which was contracted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct the $4.5 million remediation effort.

Hickey said the fuel release has not spread beyond about a one-acre area. The farthest from the spill site that oil has been detected is 120 feet, he said.

Tests in the lagoon indicate no fuel has been released into the water. Albatrosses and other seabirds nest on the ground above the spill site, but wildlife has not been exposed to the oil, he said.

"Our preliminary models show that the oil is moving tremendously slowly (through the coral soil). We have an outer set of wells that have never had any oil," he said.

Ultimately, the GeoEngineers system could recover more oil than was released in the February 2003 spill, said Dan Forney, the Fish and Wildlife Service's regional environmental compliance coordinator. That's because some of the western wells are also recovering oil from an old Navy spill of heavy Bunker C fuel oil.

If you have a question or concern about the Hawaiian environment, drop a note to Jan TenBruggencate at P.O. Box 524, Lihu'e, HI 96766, e-mail jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or call (808) 245-3074.