Defueling Red Hill planned for October under latest timeline

The U.S. Department of Defense has once again sped up its timeline for defueling the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility and now says that it expects to begin draining approximately 104 million gallons of fuel from the underground tanks in mid-October, largely completing the process in three months.

The new timeline, presented to federal and state regulators this week as part of a supplement to the Pentagon’s defueling plan, shaves off a year from the original timeline. Top military officials originally said that defueling would be completed by the end of 2024, before shortening that to July 2024.

“This supplement to the defueling plan presents a detailed roadmap and timeline for work we must accomplish and identifies the conditions that need to be met to begin the safe and expeditious removal of fuel from the facility ahead of our original plan,” said Vice Adm. John Wade, commander of Joint Task Force-Red Hill, in a press release.

Wade said that the faster timeline is the result of “finding efficiencies in our facility repair and defueling process.”

After draining the tanks, there will still be about 100,000 to 400,000 gallons of fuel remaining at the Red Hill facility that the military will still need to remove.

The start of defueling is based on a number of conditions, according to the DOD’s defeuling plan, such as regulators issuing timely approvals for various milestones, contracting with tankers to take the fuel and completing repairs at Red Hill to ensure that the fuel can be drained safely.