Families who ingested water tainted by Navy fuel in 2021 are now waiting for a ruling from a federal judge on how much the government will pay them for their suffering and the disruption to their lives.
In a closing argument delivered on Monday morning, attorney Kristina Baehr said her clients, who were sickened by leaks at the Navy’s Red Hill storage complex, have two goals: compensation and deterrence.
Her clients deserve amounts commensurate with their physical and mental pain and other losses, ranging from $225,000 to $1.25 million per person, Baehr told the court. She is seeking nearly $7 million for 17 bellwether plaintiffs, whose awards will serve as benchmarks for others who filed legal claims. The case is also meant to ensure a catastrophe of this kind does not happen again, she said.
“They’re not here to punish the United States,” Baehr said of her clients. “They’re here to protect — to protect their water, to protect their families and ultimately to protect their country.”
In closing remarks, Department of Justice attorney Eric Rey reiterated the government’s stance that there wasn’t enough fuel in the water to make anyone sick. He offered the analogy of filling up at a gas station.
“We can smell the petroleum in the air. We may even get some of it on our hands as we’re pumping gas,” he said.
“But we all don’t leave the gas station with adverse health effects. That’s because we weren’t exposed” to levels that would cause harm, he said.
Several plaintiffs shared tearful embraces with each other and their attorneys at the close of the proceedings. U.S. District Court Judge Judge Leslie Kobayashi will make a decision on causation and damages in the weeks to come.
The case was the first of its kind to go to trial following the contamination of Pearl Harbor’s drinking water system more than two years ago. On Nov. 20, 2021, the Navy’s operations at the World War II-era Red Hill fuel depot released nearly 20,000 gallons of fuel into an underground tunnel located a few hundred feet from the Red Hill well serving 93,000 people around Pearl Harbor.
Following the disaster, military investigations exposed profound shortcomings in how the Navy maintained and operated Red Hill, and the federal government subsequently admitted to negligence in Baehr’s lawsuit.
More than 5,700 people reported symptoms to the military health care system in the immediate aftermath of the contamination, including nausea, rashes and headaches.
During the trial, plaintiff Bree Jessup compared showering in the tainted water to being stung by a jellyfish.
Plaintiff Nastasia Freeman said she experienced lesions that felt like “daggers.”
In the years since the contamination, numerous families have reported longterm health problems. The toxic exposure reignited Freeman’s previously dormant seizure disorder, threw off her balance and caused a brain injury, Baehr said.
The government disputes that symptoms like these were caused by the water. In his closing argument, Rey cited comments made by Diana Felton, the state toxicologist at the time of the fuel spill, suggesting that jet fuel should be expelled from the human body within hours or days.
“The science simply doesn’t support their wide-ranging claims of health effects caused by the Nov. 20 spill that persisted beyond two and half days after their exposure ceased,” he said.
Beyond physical ailments, families also suffered psychologically, particularly parents who felt they had failed to protect their families, Baehr said.
“You heard from two grown men crying their eyes out to you,” Baehr told the judge. “Because this involved their children. They couldn’t protect their own children.”
Baehr’s clients, primarily military families, also suffered from mental anguish, the attorney said. For a week after the fuel leak, the Navy failed to inform water customers that the water could be contaminated. And even after complaints started rolling in, the Navy assured the public that there was no indication the water was unsafe.
For service members, veterans and their families, that treatment caused a feeling of betrayal by their own country, Baehr said.
“It’s their government they’ve dedicated their lives to that caused this,” she said.
Calculating damages in a case like this is difficult because of a lack of comparable lawsuits, Baehr said in court.
The Red Hill case is the first of its kind to go to trial, she said. A lawsuit filed against the federal government by victims of the Flint, Michigan, lead contamination disaster is still underway a decade after that crisis began. Getting compensation for victims who drank toxic water at the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune required an act of Congress, which occurred decades after people were exposed to hazardous solvents.
Baehr proposed a cost breakdown for each of her plaintiffs, outlining damages for pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment and therapy costs totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars per person.
The government did not address potential compensation in its closing argument. While Rey acknowledged the contamination disrupted people lives, he suggested the plaintiffs may be attributing ills to Red Hill that were caused by other factors.
“It is not reasonable to conclude — and science doesn’t support — that everything that has gone wrong or will go wrong for these bellwethers is because of the November spill,” Rey said.
At the close of the trial, Kobayashi addressed the Red Hill families directly. The judge said she wishes she could restore the families to where they were before the November 2021 fuel leak occurred, but that is “not one of the powers that I have.”
“I don’t want you to think that talking about these numbers is somehow a reduction of everything that you went through,” she said. “That somehow giving you X number of dollars heals you and makes you whole. But it’s really the only currency that we have.
“I hope, at some point, wherever the decision lands, that it gives you a sense that you’ve had your opportunity to speak your mind and represent your families,” Kobayashi said, “and I hope you can, with that, go forward with the rest of your life. I wish all of you and your families the very best.”
