The Massive Oil Plume Beneath Pearl Harbor Isn’t New, But It Is Shocking

The subsurface oil “is not a new discovery,” Navy Region Hawaii pronounced in an email to The Huffington Post.

The Navy has been operative with a EPA and Hawaii Department of Health given 1983 to guard and residence a situation. 

“The state agrees with a comment that a plume is stable,” Tom Clements, a orator for Navy Region Hawaii, told HuffPost by phone. “It is not a hazard to celebration H2O and it does not seem to be relocating toward a ocean.”

The plume is intensely formidable to access, and estimates for cleanup costs run in a tens of millions of dollars, Hawaii News Now reports. It is on a H2O list that is not a stream or destiny source of groundwater, and reportedly lies 5 to 40 feet next ground, underneath a obstruction of application lines

Although a Navy reports a plume is stable, many islanders are still concerned. 

Even State Sen. Mike Gabbard (D), who serves as chair of a cabinet on Water, Land, and Agriculture, didn’t know about a plume before this month, revelation HuffPost he was “shocked” to learn about a contamination.

“This news unfortunately adds to a distrust in a government,” he wrote in an email. 

Carroll Cox, boss of Honolulu-based environmental organisation EnviroWatch Inc., called it “the most egregious, a many damaging environmental issue

Kyle Kajihiro, a house member of Hawaii Peace Justice, pronounced that while he knew about a plume before reading a many new reports, he had not satisfied a scale and encourages an assertive cleanup effort. 

“What’s engaging for me is how something so critical and gross and vast of a problem can be dark in plain sight,” he said. 

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/09/18/massive-oil-plume-pearl-harbor_n_8209422.html?utm_hp_ref=hawaii&ir=Hawaii