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Military families in Hawaii still have health concerns after jet fuel spill into Pearl Harbor water system
A 4-year-old girl is one of thousands exposed to contaminated water after jet fuel tainted the water supply of the Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam Navy facility in Hawaii in 2021.
She woke up with a cough that never went away 13 days after the water was contaminated, mom Brittany Traeger said. Now she gets hour-long nebulizer treatments for her respiratory problems and, at least twice a day, the girl wears a vibrating vest to clear her lungs. Her parents are among 2,000 military families suing the government, alleging they were harmed by negligence at Red Hill, a fuel storage facility near the Pearl Harbor military base.
“There’s a body of government that failed,” Traeger said. “They contaminated our water, they lied to us, they did not protect us, and they did not intervene.”
What happened at Red Hill
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, construction was already underway to protect the Navy’s fuel reserves from an aerial attack. It took a little less than three years, with up to 4,000 men working there at the peak of construction, Vice Admiral John Wade said.
Seven miles of tunnels cut through volcanic rock at the Red Hill fuel storage facility. The storage site, once a secret facility, provided fuel for the Pacific Fleet and its planes for 80 years. Wade showed 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi one of 20 tanks at the facility. It holds 12.5 million gallons.
“And to give you kind of a reference point, the Statue of Liberty — not the base, but the statue itself — can fit in here with enough room,” Wade said.
60 Minutes
Decades later, the testament to American resolve became a monumental liability after jet fuel sprayed from a cracked pipe inside Red Hill on Nov. 20, 2021. The fuel, 20,000 gallons of it, was trapped in a plastic pipe. The weight caused the pipe to sag and a trolley hit it.
For 21 hours, jet fuel spewed close to the well that supplied drinking water for 93,000 people on and around the base at Pearl Harbor.
The workers who responded didn’t have the right tools to contain the spill, according to Navy investigators. They also assumed there was no danger to the drinking water.
They were wrong. At least 5,000 gallons of jet fuel drained into the tunnel floor and into the Navy water system.
What families were told after the spill
The day after the spill, the Navy issued a press release about the incident and told the 8,400 families living in military housing “the water remains safe to drink,” even though the Navy had not tested the water yet.
Traeger lived on base, about two and a half miles from Red Hill, along with her daughter and husband, who’s a Navy chief petty officer.
“My husband came into the kitchen and washed his hands and said, ‘Gosh, the water smells like I just did an oil change,'” Traeger said.
She said she began to feel sick a week after the spill. She had a cough, swollen tonsils and vertigo.
60 Minutes
Nine days after the spill, the commanding officer of the base sent an email to residents saying “there are no immediate indications that the water is not safe. My staff and I are drinking the water.”
Traeger said she stopped using water and stopped taking baths, doing the same for her daughter — just because she had a bad feeling, not because anyone told her to. The Navy had given out an email address for people to contact if they wanted their water tested.
“I emailed those people, who then emailed me a phone number that I should call. And I called that phone number for days and it was just busy,” Traeger said. “They were overwhelmed and inundated with reports.”
Ten days after the spill, there were more than 200 reports from six neighborhoods across the base of strong fuel odor coming from kitchen and bathroom faucets. But the Navy said its initial tests did not detect fuel.
Navy reverses course
After 12 days and four statements assuring residents the water was fine, the Navy reversed course. On Dec. 2, 2021, it announced more comprehensive tests conducted by the Navy had detected jet fuel in the water.
Three weeks after the spill, tests from the Hawaii Department of Health revealed jet fuel levels 350 times higher than what the state considers safe.
Richelle Dietz, who lives on base with her husband, a Navy chief petty officer, and their two children, was so sick to the stomach when she heard the news that she threw up.
“Because my kids had just been poisoned,” Dietz said.
60 Minutes
Within a month of the spill, the Navy set up medical tents for residents. Some complained of stomach problems, severe fatigue and coughing. The military moved more than 4,000 families to hotels.
The water system was flushed over three months and bottled water was brought in. Three months passed before Pearl Harbor’s drinking water was deemed safe again.
The Navy’s own investigations into the spill described “cascading failures” and revealed poor training, supervision and ineffective leadership at Red Hill that fell “unacceptably short of Navy standards.”
Closing Red Hill down
Hawaiians have raised concerns about the threat of smaller leaks at Red hill for the last decade. The primary water supply for the city of Honolulu is 100 feet below the Navy complex.
In March of 2022, the secretary of defense ordered Red Hill permanently closed. Vice Admiral Wade was brought in to get the 104 million gallons of fuel out of the tanks and move it safely to sites around the Pacific.
“We’ve got to defuel. That’s the imminent threat,” Wade said. “There’s ongoing and will be continued long-term environmental remediation to restore the aquifer, the land and surrounding area. And then there’s also a medical component for those that have been impacted.”
In six months, Wade’s team in Hawaii successfully removed almost all of the fuel, but it took two years before the Navy issued disciplinary letters to 14 officers involved in the spill response, including five admirals.
Meredith Berger, an assistant secretary of the Navy, said the Navy has been accountable.
“It’s accountability within the system that we have established,” Berger said. “We have heard that this was too long, and that maybe it didn’t go far enough.”
Grappling with health concerns and suing the government
Two thousand military families agree the Navy didn’t go far enough and are suing the government. The lawsuit is set to go to trial on Monday.
Dietz, who’s joined the suit, feels angry and betrayed. Her husband has been in the Navy for almost 18 years and the family has moved across the country and across oceans for his work.
“We gave so much of our life to the Navy for them to ignore warnings,” Dietz said. “And then we were directly and blatantly lied to about it.
Her daughter’s tonsils became inflamed days after the spill and her son started suffering from chronic headaches, she said. The mom says neither of them had those problems before November 2021.
Small studies of military personnel suggest jet fuel exposure can lead to neurological and breathing problems, but the long-term impact of ingesting jet fuel is unknown because it’s so unlikely to ever happen.
It’s unclear how many got sick, but of 2,000 people who responded to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 850 sought medical care.
Navy leadership has apologized for the spill, but has not said that the contaminated water is the cause of the ongoing illnesses. It did set up a clinic on base to collect data and treat anyone who believes they have health issues related to the tainted water.
Berger was asked if those services would still be available down the road.
60 Minutes
“That is part of why we are making sure that we’re collecting that information to inform future actions and what the requirements are for those types of needs and care,” Berger said.
“I want to be careful, because I don’t do the health care part of things,” Berger said. “I don’t want to speak outside of where I have any authority or decision.”
When 60 Minutes followed up with the Defense Department, it said it is reviewing the question of long-term health care for military families, including more than 3,100 children.
The Navy is conducting daily tests at Pearl Harbor and says it is confident there is no fuel in the tap water.
Traeger shared what accountability looks like for her.
“A lifelong-care plan for me, my family, and the people affected,” she said. “And that will restore my faith in my nation.”
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Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other acclaimed films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne “passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure, told CBS News in a statement. She did not provide a cause of death.
In an industry which gave birth to rueful jokes about the writer’s status, Towne for a time held prestige comparable to the actors and directors he worked with. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the signature films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control. The rare “auteur” among screen writers, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles onto the screen.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for AFI
“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”
Recognizable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three other times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” said “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s business, a dress shop, closed down because of the Great Depression. His father changed the family name to Towne.
Towne’s success came after a long stretch of working in television, including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and on low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. As Beatty worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set while the movie was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions were uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favorite ghost writer. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” among others and referred to himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited by name for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private detective asked to follow the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey across a grander and more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate into a timeless detective tale, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in movie history, words of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
The back story of “Chinatown” has itself become a kind of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of 1960s-1970s Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” dedicated entirely to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” published in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost writer — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not ask for credit on the film because his “friendship with Robert” mattered more.
The studios assumed more power after the mid-1970s and Towne’s standing declined. His own efforts at directing, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical disappointment when released in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Around the same time, he agreed to work on a movie far removed from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 movie was famously over budget and mostly panned, although its admirers include Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne’s script popularized an expression used by Duvall after Cruise complains another car slammed him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you. He rubbed you.
“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”
Towne later worked with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” movies. His most recent film was “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that came out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote screenplays, his credits include “The Natural.”
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