Davis Levin Livingston is proud to be an Organizational Sponsor of the Red Hill Pledge. As plaintiffs’ attorneys dedicated to protecting and promoting the health, welfare, and legal rights of the people of Hawai‘i, we support urgent legislation to permanently shut down the U.S. Navy’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility and protect O‘ahu’s drinking water.
Fuel leaks from the Navy’s massive fuel storage facility at Kapūkaki, known today as Red Hill, have already tainted the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people on O‘ahu. With more than 100 million gallons of fuel currently stored in the rusting World War II-era storage tanks, located less than 100 feet above O‘ahu’s primary source of fresh water, the continued operation of the Red Hill facility presents an unreasonable risk of catastrophic harm to the people, environment, and economy of Hawai‘i.
Since Red Hill’s construction in 1943, no less than 180,000 gallons of fuel have leaked into the environment, according to the Sierra Club of Hawai‘i. The most recent leak took place in November of 2021 and involved 14,000 gallons of “fuel-water mixture.”
In January of 2022, the Navy obtained a permit to discharge millions of gallons of water that was contaminated in last year’s petroleum leak. Sadly, even once the lingering problems from the most recent leak are resolved, the antiquated fuel tanks will continue to endanger nearly 1 million people on O‘ahu who rely on the aquifer below for water.
“The Navy’s own studies cite that there is a 27.6 % chance that the facility could leak up to 30,000 gallons of fuel every year,” The Sierra Club explains. “That is an almost 1 in 3 chance that another large leak … will occur in the future.”
It is clear that we must take immediate action to defuel and decommission the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility before it is too late. At Davis Levin Livingston, we are proud to have taken the #RedHillPledge. We encourage you to do so too.
Protect our people, protect our water, and #ShutDownRedHill! Ola I Ka Wai!
Take the Red Hill Pledge here: https://www.redhillpledge.com/.
About Davis Levin Livingston
For more than 40 years, our Honolulu-based legal team at Davis Levin Livingston has fought to protect the rights of our neighbors across the Hawaiian Islands. We are known for taking on a range of complex cases and winning them, including birth injury, medical malpractice, auto accidents, and class actions, among other cases. What’s more, our case results amount to hundreds of millions of dollars recovered for those catastrophically injured or bereaved due to no fault of their own.
We fight because we care.
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