$17 Million In Court Settlements Is Coming To Red Hill Families

Nearly 630 of the plaintiffs affected by Navy water contamination in Central Oʻahu will receive a combined payment of $17 million in the latest batch of Red Hill court settlements announced by the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday.

DOJ leaders touted the move as a good-faith step toward resolving the matter, in which scores of military personnel, their families and civilian workers were sickened by tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel spilled in 2021. Some victims, however, called the deals “a slap in the face” that don’t go nearly far enough to compensate all the damage done.

The settlements apply to family members who were sickened — not the service members themselves — and they stem from two lawsuits brought against the Navy in recent years over Red Hill contamination under the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA.

Together, those suits — Feindt v. United States and Hughes v. United States — represent more than 6,500 claims.

Some 3,600 Red Hill plaintiffs in those suits have now reached settlements with the federal government over their health ordeals, according to the DOJ, out of more than 6,500 claims.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate called the latest settlements a “just and fair resolution.”

“We look forward to paying additional claims once they’re approved,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

Kristina Baehr, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said the roughly $27,000 awarded to each of the 629 plaintiffs who took the deal fell far short of the minimum amount laid out in an order by U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi. Kobayashi’s order, according to Baehr, called for the federal government to pay between $38,500 and $76,000.

Army Maj. Mandy Feindt, whose husband, Patrick, was the lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits, said $27,000 wouldn’t come close to covering the health damages, property loss and other ordeals that families faced in the wake of the Red Hill spills that year.

“I know that to some people it seems like a lot, but for our family alone, we’ve been to over 800 medical appointments,” said Feindt, whose family now lives in Virginia.

Feindt’s 8-year-old daughter still suffers from neurological issues, she said, and her son, now 6 years old, suffered permanent lung damage after the Navy’s water supply was contaminated.

“Many of us spent thousands of dollars in getting medical care for our families and moving,” Feindt said. “Our family alone has done two compassionate reassignments, and we’ll never recover all of that money. We lost everything.”

Prior legal maneuverings by the government, court rulings showed, helped limit the criteria that could be considered in issuing the awards and determining settlements. The plaintiffs’ awards will further be reduced by attorneys’ fees, which can take up to a 25% bite out of the total, and related expenses.

Feindt said her family accepted a $37,500 settlement as part of the tort case, but they refused the $15,000 settlement for her daughter and $5,000 for her son and continue to contest the matter in court on their behalf.

“Our case basically sort of set the precedent, which is why we rejected the kids’ payout,” she said Wednesday. “We’re bearing a lot of weight on our shoulders, because what we accept paves the way for those thousands of other people that come behind us.”

Baehr said the government in the past two weeks did approve two new settlements within the monetary range called for in Kobayashi’s ruling: one at $45,000 and another at $55,000. She said she hoped that would set a precedent for the remaining cases to receive higher awards.

The DOJ’s Civil Division said in a statement it is continuing to process more settlements as it works to get more of those deals approved.

Meanwhile, the legal fight over whether Feindt and other service members should be compensated for the water contamination continues to play out in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal government, according to Baehr, has argued that service personnel shouldn’t be compensated because their exposure to the contamination was “incident to military service.”

That stance further upsets Feindt, who took issue Wednesday with Shumate’s statement that the DOJ is committed to “ensuring justice for our nation’s heroes who repeatedly risk greatly to safeguard our freedoms.”

“For those of us who have risked our lives in this country it’s pretty significant to have our families, especially those with small children, poisoned,” Feindt said.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.