2025-01-07 Mike Reimer, Ph.D. - Laserfiche WebLink

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TESTIMONY: Hawaii County General Plan 2045: Leeward Planning Commission January 16-17, 2025 p. 4 Freshwater is provided to PTA by trucking, a major operation that requires about 4,000 trucks a year with 5,000 gallons each of potable water. The cost is over three million dollars a year. The Army entered into a cooperative project in 2013 to drill at PTA to see if freshwater could be found to provide supply for PTA. The plan was to drill a hole over 6,000 feet deep to encounter the saline level at sea level and hope that freshwater reservoirs were found above this saline level. Surprisingly, the drill hole encountered a perched freshwater reservoir at a 600-foot depth. (https-//www.dvidshub.net/news/229643/army-taps-consortium-find-water-training-area- high-up-hawaiian-volcano). Any near-surface reservoir could easily become contaminated from the toxins used during training exercises, just as the unlined ponds for fracking development have leached through the porous overburden into groundwater. The freshwater perched reservoir found was never developed. This drilling occurred in 2013 and it is unknown if the contamination from the PTA surface operations contaminated that shallow freshwater reservoir. Such a potential pollution source is described below but it is not the only one that could provide contaminants for underground water sources. A major concern of groundwater pollution today is "forever chemicals", those per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly used in fire-fighting foams, which do not breakdown in the environment contribute greatly to health risks. The U.S. Army has been analyzing for those "forever chemicals" that have been part of the releases into the environment from their training activities at PTA and Kilauea Military Reservation. (https-//aec.a rm y.m i I/aec/6616/9869/7418/Pl-A-KM R-P FAS_PAS 1.pdf). The analyses so far seem to have been only conducted in soils and not groundwater. This 2023 report states that, for PTA, historical reports place ground water levels several hundred to 1 ,000 feet or more below the surface and so they were not sampled. It is incongruous that this 2023 report ignored the perched groundwater table found at 600 feet below the surface as it was being considered for a potable water source. Testing it would have provided important information on the rate of movement of contaminants below the surface. The Army has established their own risk-based screening concentration levels above which they would conduct further studies for remedial action. That level was set at 70 parts per trillion. In a report of July 2023, concentrations in soils were found at PTA above those levels (Table ES-1 in https://aec.army.miI/aec/6616/9869/7418/PTA-KMR PFAS PASI.pdf).