A federal judge has awarded more than $680,000 to 17 families who say they were sickened by a leak from a second-world-war era fuel tank into a US navy drinking water system in Hawaii in 2021.
The bellwether cases set the legal tone for another 7,500 military family members, civilians and service members whose lawsuits are still awaiting resolution.
US district judge Leslie Kobayashi handed down the ruling on Wednesday, awarding from $5,000 to more than $104,000 to each plaintiff. In her order, Kobayashi wrote that it was clear that even though the contaminated water could have caused many of the kinds of medical problems the military families experienced, there was not enough evidence to prove a direct link.
The military built the Red Hill fuel tanks into the side of a mountain in the early 1940s to protect them from aerial attack. The site was in the hills above Pearl Harbor and on top of an aquifer equipped with wells that provided drinking water to the navy and to Honolulu’s municipal water system.
In 2021, jet fuel gushed from a ruptured pipe in the military-run tank farm, leaking into a well that supplied water to housing and offices in and around the sprawling base. About 6,000 people suffered nausea, headaches, rashes and other symptoms.
The amount awarded to each of plaintiff was significantly smaller than the roughly $225,000 to $1.25m that their attorney, Kristina Baehr, requested during the two-week trial in federal court in Honolulu.
As bellwether plaintiffs, the 17 were chosen because they were seen as representative of the thousands of other people whose cases are still pending.
Baehr called the damage awards disappointing but said the families “prevailed against all odds against the US Government”.
“These families can be proud that they helped prove to the world what truly happened when the Navy poisoned the water supply near Pearl Harbor and sickened so many,” Baehr said in a news release. “The Court rejected the Government’s argument that thousands of our clients were just psychosomatic and that there was not enough fuel to make anyone sick.”
Baehr said the legal team was reviewing options for resolving the thousands of remaining cases.
The government admitted liability for the spill before the trial began, but its attorneys disputed whether the plaintiffs were exposed to enough jet fuel to cause the vomiting, rashes and other alleged negative health effects.
