The Department of Defense issued letters of censure last week against three retired admirals for their leadership failures that led to fuel contamination and the spill of toxic firefighting foam at Red Hill.
Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro formally scolded retired Rear Adms. Peter Stamatopoulos, John Korka and Timothy Kott. But what is a letter of censure?
"It goes in their permanent files, and one of the things about this type of letter is that they don't have a right to appeal it. They can write something that goes next to that letter in their file. But these flag officers are retired, so nothing else is going to happen. The letter of censure is it. It's not considered a punishment," said military attorney Natanyah Ganz.
Ganz served as a major with the legal arm of the military, the Judge Advocate General's Corps, and is a partner at the local firm Ganz & Bridges.
She said the letters are not going to affect the amount of money they're getting in retirement. Ganz said the military could theoretically court-martial them, but "it would be very, very rare to court-martial retired flag officers."
David Frankel is an attorney from the group representing the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi, which battled the Navy early on over its spills at Red Hill. He attended a Red Hill open house hosted by the military at Ke’ehi Lagoon Monday night.
"The sanctions are not even a slap on the wrist. They're really nothing," he said. "It's encouraging that the Navy has recognized what some of the problems were, but they aren't sanctions... It's kind of meaningless as far as accountability goes."
The Navy said Korka's failures led to the release of a toxic firefighting concentrate, and he did not follow contracting procedures nor provide proper oversight during the installation of the firefighting system.
He was the commander of Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific before the leaks from May 2017 to September 2018. He went on to serve as commander of NAVFAC for three years until August 2022.
As for Stamatopoulus, the Navy said he was negligent in approving an inadequate investigation into the May 2021 fuel spill that led to the contamination in November 2021 of Oʻahu's drinking water. He was the commander of Naval Supply Systems Command during both leaks.
The letter to Kott said he failed to call in an environmental assessment team following the November spill and did not tell the public that the Red Hill well had been secured until four days after the fact. He was the commander of Navy Region Hawaiʻi.
Click here to read the letters of censure.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Oct. 4, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Sophia McCullough adapted this story for the web.
