Aloha and Welcome to the HUMMA Project Website
The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UH), with the assistance from the environmental consulting firm Environet, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as Environet) had been awarded to conduct the Hawai‘i Undersea Military Munitions Assessment (HUMMA) project. Sub-contracted to perform the assessment by Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC), HUMMA’s purpose is to locate discarded military munitions (DMM), which may include chemical munitions. This program will support the Department of Defense’s (DoD) efforts to assess the potential risk to human health and the environment.
The selected site for this study, which DoD designated as Hawai‘i-05 (HI-05) is located approximately 5 miles south of Pearl Harbor and is the primary focus of HUMMA’s efforts. Historical records show that after World War II approximately 16,000 M47A2 100-pound (lb) bombs, each filled with chemical mustard agents disposed of at HI-05. The sea disposal site for HUMMA, HI-05, will serve develop a systematic approach for locating; bounding and characterizing deep water sea disposal sites and assessing the potential impact of sea disposed munitions on human health and the ocean environment, and of the ocean environment on sea disposed munitions.
As previous HUMMA efforts were conducted to address six factors within the HUMMA Study Area was evaluated including: 1) the spatial extent and distribution of munitions; 2) the integrity of discarded military munitions (DMM); 3) whether munitions constituents (MC) could be detected in sediment, seawater or human food items near DMM; 4) whether MC levels at DMM sites differed significantly from levels at reference control (RC) sites; 5) whether statistically significant differences in ecological population metrics could be detected between DMM and RC sites; and 6) whether MC or their derivatives potentially posed an unacceptable risk to human health.
As funding for HUMMA was made possible through the efforts of Hawai’i’s Congressional delegation and by the DoD Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Environment Safety and Occupational Health (ODASA-ESOH), through its National Defense Center for Energy and the Environment a third HUMMA project is in the making.
The present HUMMA project, named HUMMA-III, seeks to develop a Sample and Analysis Plan (SAP), based on the initial 2009 HUMMA Sampling Program and lessons learned from that program, to investigate the effects of the ocean environment on newly detected DMM.
This website will provide the public with accurate and timely information about the program and its results.