The state Commission on Water Resource Management discussed Tuesday the discovery of a new class of contaminants in an ʻAiea well earlier this summer — the same well that the Honolulu Board of Water Supply shut down at the end of 2021 after a fuel leak from the Red Hill storage facility. The Navy also discovered the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, in its sampling of underground monitoring wells just below the now-empty Red Hill facility.
So could the contaminants be from the military facility or somewhere else? Geochemist Don Thomas of the University of Hawaiʻi School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology has been taking a closer look at the Board of Water Supply sampling and the Navy’s underground monitoring wells just above Oʻahu's drinking aquifer.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Aug. 20, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
