The Navy on Tuesday began pumping nearly 5 million gallons of treated water each day from a well in Hawaii contaminated by a petroleum spill that sickened military families on the island of Oahu.
It will be pumped from its Red Hill well into a carbon treatment system designed to remove fuel from the extracted water, officials said.
The leaking fuel tanks are located above the Red Hill aquifer that supplies drinking water to the Pearl Harbor Naval Base and other military bases on Oahu.
The Navy closed the well in late November following reports of nausea, vomiting and other medical problems related to the contaminated water.
Hawaiian health officials said it’s critical to pump water out of the Red Hill shaft so it doesn’t migrate to other parts of the aquifer.
“There is an urgent need to clean up the contamination from the Navy’s Red Hill shaft,” Kathleen Ho, Hawaii associate director of environmental health, said in a statement. The Department of Health “authorizes the Navy to begin pumping and treating water from the Red Hill shaft to prevent contamination from spreading throughout the aquifer.”
Ms Ho said state officials would continue to oversee and ensure the measures “protect human health and the environment.”
The water is monitored for contaminants as it passes through the filtration system and eventually into the neighboring Halawa Stream.
Navy officials said the discharged water will account for less than 1% of the amount of water in the stream during peak stormwater flow.
State health officials said pumping operations would be halted if at any point contamination exceeded “acceptable limits”.
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