News this morning that fuel spills from a Navy depot on the Big Island of Hawaii are allegedly polluting the Island's water supply.  This may sound familiar.  Just last year the United States Supreme Court told Guam that it could sue the Navy, again, for the cost of remediating a dump it had left behind there.  See https://insights.mintz.com/post/102gyzk/that-snowball-in-guam-just-melted.

I expect that the Navy isn't going to immediately do whatever the Hawaii Department of Health says it should do just because the Hawaii Department of Health says it should do it.  Hopefully another dispute that reaches the Supreme Court is no more likely.

Over the course of my careers I've been involved in many cases in which the branches of our Armed Forces have been held accountable for contaminating our environment.   Perhaps not surprisingly, sometimes one branch of the Federal Government treats another branch of the Federal Government differently than it would treat another entity.

This Hawaii situation seems to be evidence that the United States still has some serious investing to do so that its military bases finally meet the same environmental standards that it has been enforcing against the private sector for years. 

"Beginning no later than 2018, the regulatory agencies have repeatedly and consistently provided, and [Navy] has consistently rejected, significant technical corrective comment on the … conceptual site model, the purpose of which is to describe the hydrogeologic site conditions, and respondent's preliminary groundwater flow models, the purpose of which is to determine groundwater movement as may be related to contaminant transport," the DOH said in its order.