Red Hill Jet Fuel Leak: What’s Happening?

Honolulu Injury Lawyer Wayne Parsons Accepting Claims

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Video Transcript:

Wayne Parsons: 

Anybody who got sick, anybody who went to the emergency room, anyone who had skin lesions or blisters, whatever kind of your skin irritations should go to a doctor and get checked out.

Tom Mustin: 

Clean drinking water is something we all take for granted, but what happens when that water becomes contaminated? Well, it's happening in Hawaii. It's something we're gonna talk about on today's episode of Ask the Lawyer. Hello, I'm Tom Mustin with AskTheLawyers.com. Our guest is Wayne Parsons, who's an attorney in Hawaii. And I wanna remind you right at the top here, if you'd like to ask Wayne any questions about one of your situations, just go to AskTheLawyers.com, click the button at the top that says Ask a Lawyer, and it'll walk you through the very simple process, and of course, you can also always call the phone number you'll see at the top of the screen here. So Wayne, aloha, great to see you. And thank you for helping us out today.

Wayne Parsons: 

Aloha and glad to talk to you today. 

Tom Mustin: 

So Wayne I understand that many residents of these projects are in the military, so can... They actually file suit against the Navy?

Wayne Parsons: 

Well, there's a United States Supreme Court case and a doctrine called the Feres doctrine, and the Feres doctrine says an active duty military person can not file suit against the military, and that is certainly true in these cases, except in a situation where this is a claim, if the military person is filing a claim arising from the rental of their property, and they rent that property, even though it may be somehow connected with the military. They rent that property from a private company, and that's what's happened here, so active duty military people can, in my opinion, file claims for recovery of rent paid. 

Again, if you rent a place and you pay $2,000 to $3,000 a month to your landlord and the landlord doesn't provide you drinkable water in your residence, and worse than that actually provides you water that may be harmful to your health and may cause terrible conditions, you don't have to pay rent, they can't collect rent from you. Now, a court determines that. So there are lawsuits being brought, and we brought a major class action lawsuit to recover that rent, to get the rent back that was paid by active duty military people running those homes in the affected area.

So yes, they can, again, a court's gotta rule on that, we don't... The fact that I say it, we've gotta go to court and have the court put their blessing on it, but the Feres doctrine should not prevent that from happening. It's not an illegal act for a military person to file a suit against a private company that they rent their house from for the fact that the premises are inhabitable.

Tom Mustin: 

Okay, good answer there, so what's the status of the suits that have been filed and how many different types of lawsuits are being filed in connection with the Red Hill water contamination?

Wayne Parsons: 

It's... The first lawsuits were filed were class action cases to cover all the people in these areas, in the affected areas who rented property from these private companies that rent the property to not only military people, but some private, regular citizens, and those cases were filed in state court, by us, there's another law firm that also filed to them or cooperating with that law firm, we're working together on those cases to make sure that everybody gets justice here, and those cases have filed in state court and the defendants in the case removed the case to federal court. I won't go into exactly what that means, but it means they push the cases up into federal court, and we have now filed motions to remand, meaning we've asked the federal court to look at the cases and say, Oh no, these cases shouldn't be here, they should be held in state court because of the particular facts and law involved, and there's a hearing on those motions in Federal Court on June 3rd, and they'll be actively briefed and argued in front of a federal judge, and we're hoping and we have some confidence that these cases will be returned to state court. Doesn't really affect the clients, it's more of a... These are legal things that happen in a lot of cases, we run into it all the time, and that will be settled by June, and then the cases will get going in earnest. 

Wayne Parsons: 

The other types of cases that are being... Are gonna be litigated are injury cases for people who suffered injuries because they drank the contaminated water. You don't wanna drink petroleum products, you don't wanna drink jet fuel, and there's a lot of other stuff that may be in there, and those things have deleterious long-term effects on human beings, many of the things that happen, you won't find out for a number of years, so those personal injury cases, illness and injury cases are also gonna be filed, they're not class actions, they're individual cases for individual people, we have to prove the harm, we have to prove that it was caused by the jet fuel in those cases, if the Navy may be involved in those cases, in those cases against the Navy, require a Federal Tort Claim Act to be filed. That's how you sue the navy and active duty military cannot file against the Navy for a personal injury, so those might be cases where they can't bring their personal injury case, but the family certainly could, and the dependents that anybody who's not in the military and there might even be some exceptions where they can file...The active duty military could file against private landlord.

Tom Mustin: 

You were talking about illness and injury, so what should people who have been exposed to this contaminated water know?

Wayne Parsons: 

Well, first of all, there are a number of conditions that we know can happen if you ingest, if you drink or exposed through the air to petroleum products. Those cover a wide range of conditions. At the outset, anybody who got sick, anybody who went to the emergency room, anyone who had skin lesions or blisters, whatever kind of skin irritations should go to a doctor and get checked out. The doctors don't have quick tests that they can perform to say, Oh, you have this or you have that, so those things have to be followed and they may have to be followed for a while, in fact, it's part of these kind of toxic exposures to chemicals, oftentimes the actual effect doesn't manifest itself for five or 10 or 15 years, that's true of pesticides, that's true of a lot of chemical exposures that modify a person's system and then show up later in their life as a disease condition.

I would point out that there are a lot of children in these communities, and even there were some pregnant women who took showers and bathed and were exposed to these petrochemicals, jet fuel, and they would certainly be worth monitoring because the size of a child's kidney, liver, all their systems, their organs are small, their brains, and so the concentration of these contaminating products are much higher in their bodies, and again, they may not show an impact from this for 10 or 15 years, we hope nobody gets anything long-term from this, but it should be monitored and Navy owes it to the people involved to do that, to make sure that they have health care, to make sure if anything is wrong, it's dealt with quickly and as early as possible.

Tom Mustin: 

And when the military announced that the tanks and the fuel in those tanks will be voluntarily removed and the affected land and structures cleaned up. Is that correct? And is that the end of it then?

Wayne Parsons: 

That's correct. And you know, of course, it just a pronouncement, it's a promise or it's a statement. I take all of those things as very positive, I applaud the Navy for stepping out front and taking that position. I would just remind everybody that one of the problems here is not just getting rid of the fuel tanks and the jet fuel and getting it out of that whole area, so no more of this happens, but How do you remediate the rest of that area? The jet fuel got into the water, he got into the soil, which was abutting that water, it also leaked out probably into the soil and it's in those pipelines. How do you get rid of that? I would remind everybody that about 10 years ago, there was a gigantic pile of dirt at Pearl Harbor. They had torn down a whole bunch of World War II era houses, and they were gonna rebuild new houses there, and they found out that that soil had been contaminated with pesticides, back in the 40s and 50s and 60s, and that soil was toxic, had carcinogens in it, organic chlorine chemicals in it, and they didn't know what to do with it, they dug it up, but they couldn't give it away to anybody.

It sat there for a long time under black tarps, so you can't just remediate soil. It changes the biochemistry of the molecules in the soil itself, and so I think that's an area where... I think for the state of Hawaii, we need to make sure that that remediation gets done and done by the best scientists in the world, and the best engineers in the world, and gets them to actually solve the problem, you gotta make sure it's not done too quickly and assumptions are made that shouldn't be made, and later on we find if we have a problem 20 or 30 years down the road, we need to solve that problem now, so remediation is going to be a huge subject. From what I heard, the Navy's gonna do it, I applaud them. I'm tax payer, you can use my taxpayer money for that, but we need to be vigilant and we need to have our own independent experts watch that to make sure it gets done.

Tom Mustin: 

So Wayne, the bottom line is, the story is far from over.

Wayne Parsons: 

It's just beginning... The story is just beginning. And the good news is that people are watching and people are looking at it, we're bringing the best experts and scientists in the world on our behalf as lawyers to try and try and figure out what it is that needs to be done. I've been involved in cases like this before, the product Benlate on the Big Island back in the 90s, killed a lot of plants and farms were ruined by this fungicide and it contaminated the soil. And the team of lawyers I'm working with Jim Bickerton and Bridget Morgan here on Honolulu along with me, I'm a Honolulu lawyer. And Rob Siko, he's a Honolulu native... He's from Hawaii, he's living in California, and he's working with Anderson, Thornton and Andrews, who went to high school here. One of the top women lawyers in the United States, we've got a great team working on it, and we're gonna get to the bottom of what's going on and do our part to try to make the island safe.

Tom Mustin: 

Well, Wayne, a lot of great information. And we certainly appreciate your time and expertise. Thank you very much. 

Wayne Parsons:

Thank you. And that'll do it for this episode of Ask the lawyer. My guest has been Hawaii attorney, Wayne Parsons. If you wanna ask questions about your situation, go to AskTheLawyers.com, click the button at the top that says ask a lawyer, and it'll walk you through a very simple process there. Thank you for watching. I'm Tom Mustin with askthelawyers.com.

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