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Good morning.

Will the committee on infrastructure and transportation and technology please come to order?

It is 9 02 AM on Wednesday, November 19, 2025.

I would like to welcome committee members Bayer and Dosantos Tam.

Uh Councilmember Tupola will be joining shortly.

Um is excused for the moment, and committee vice chair Okimoto is excused from today's meeting.

Pursuant to Section 92-3.7, the Hawaii revised statutes this meeting will be conducted as a remote meeting by interactive conference technology with the following procedures in effect for the meeting.

Members of the public will be allowed to provide oral testimony on all items on the agenda through two ways, remotely and in person in the council chamber.

Remote and in-person testimony will be allowed when the agenda item is taken up.

As both English and Hawaiian are official languages of the state of Hawaii, pursuant to Article 15, Section 4 of the Hawaii State, not revised, Hawaii State Constitution.

And in either and section 1-13 of the Hawaii revised statutes, members of the public may testify in either language.

For rural oral testimonies offered in Olelo Hawaii, additional time as may be necessary, it will be allowed for the testifier to provide an English translation of their testimony.

Before testifying, each person shall state their name.

Each speaker may not have anyone else read their statement and is limited to a one-minute presentation on each item.

All persons who have registered to testify remotely by video conference or via phone will be called upon first.

When your name is called, please monitor your screen and activate your audio when prompt audio feed when prompted.

I will then give persons who have not registered an opportunity to offer testimony.

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For those who are joining us via telephone only, please press star 9 to indicate your desire to speak.

With that, we will move to the first informational briefing item, which is the update on the Board of Water Supply's ongoing efforts to address contamination caused by the Red Hill fuel spill.

Members, I do want to note that as Kapu Kaki is in my district.

We are nearing the, I don't want to say anniversary, but the fourth year since the last biggest incident and spill occurred at Kapu Kakhi.

We know that there are events occurring and efforts continuously, but uh one one none other, uh one none stronger than those at the Board of Water Supply.

And currently in my district in IEA and in Halava, we are seeing efforts that are occurring that I know members of the council have been briefed by and on as well as members in my neighborhoods of A Halava have been briefed upon as well about these efforts.

So I wanted to ensure since infrastructure is a part of my committee purview that we highlighted that here publicly, and I want to thank uh Manager Lau as well as Joyce for being able to be here today.

Um and I want to mahalo you for the efforts for outreach, the community meetings, the neighborhood boards, and continuously being out there in our areas to address all this issue, all this all these issues.

Uh with that, um, once again, we have manager and chief engineer Ernie Lau as well as Joyce Lynn from the Board of Water Supply.

Um, and for your information, the departmental communication is the um 8 months 7, 2025.

Uh, for those who wish to see it online or on HL docs.

I will now then kick it over to the Board of Water Supply for their presentation.

Um chair and members, uh Ernie Lau, manager and chief engineer for the Honolulu Board of Water Supply.

Uh, I guess I would characterize this as yeah, we are approaching the fourth year remembrance of a terrible event that occurred in 2021 when 93,000 people were exposed to fuel contaminated drinking water in their homes on joint base Pearl Harbor Hickam.

Uh this is a a time to remember and not to forget uh because the work is still ahead of us, and there is a need to think about this challenge in an intergenerational approach.

That this is not a problem that will be resolved in one generation in my generation.

It'll take generations to come to resolve this.

Uh so with that in mind, I uh we are preparing for the intergenerational effort.

I'd like to introduce Joyce Lynn, a uh engineer, you know, civil engineer in our the manager's office, and uh uh she is gonna do today's presentation.

I'll be available uh to help in answering questions later.

Mahalo Joyce.

Thank you, Ernie, and good morning, Chair Codaro and committee members.

I'm Joyce Lynn with the Honolulu Border Water Supply providing this Red Hill update.

So just a quick overview of the Red Hill bulk fuel storage facility.

The facility was built in 1940s during the World War II era.

There is 20 underground storage tanks built underneath the Red Hill Valley.

The tanks itself are 100 feet across, 220 feet tall.

So for visual comparisons, a Aloha Tower fits comfortably in one of these tanks.

Also a part of this Red Hill fuel storage facility is two tunnel systems, one upper tunnel and one lower tunnel access, which connects the fuel tanks to the pump rooms in Pearl Harbor.

Within the lower access tunnel, there are pipelines that transports the fuel from the tanks to and from.

As you can see on the bottom left, um, the tank sits just 100 feet above our drinking water aquifer.

And in total, it has a 200th over when all the tanks are filled, it has capacity to fill 250 million gallons of fuel.

The facility first got onto the border water supplies radar in 2014 when Navy released 27,000 gallons of fuel from tank 5 during a fuel transfer operation.

And as a result of this fuel release, the 2015 administrative order on consent was created, which provided oversight from the EPA and DOH on tank maintenance and groundwater modeling for this general area.

This 2015 administrative order consent or AOC was entered between the DOH, EPA, the Navy, as well as the defense logistic agency who takes ownership of the fields within the tanks.

And as you see on this table, we later found out that there were numerous historical releases as early as early 1940s, early neat um as of late, as early as of the late 1940s, soon after the tanks were created and built.

But here we have some of the more recent releases that we are aware of.

And so following the 2015 2014 release, the 2015 AOC was created.

However, it was unable to prevent the 2021 release that contaminated the Red Hill shaft.

In November 2020, a overhead line broke, creating a massive spill that contaminated the Red Hill Shaft, and the fuel got into the Navy's joint, the joint base, Pearl Harbor's Hickum's drinking water system, impacting 93,000 residents that lived on the live on and use that water system.