Retired Navy diver testifies about his family’s problems with contaminated Hawaii water

HONOLULU – Navy Petty Officer Brian Jessup was bathing his 10-month-old son in their Honolulu home in November 2021 when his wife called from work with an urgent request: Don’t use the tap water.

“She was very worried and panicked,” Jessup, a special operations diver who retired from the Navy last year, testified Thursday in Hawaii federal court.

His wife, Sheena Jessup, said customers told her the Navy housing water system at and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam was contaminated.

Jessup and his daughter, Breanna, 16, testified via Zoom in Feindt vs. United States, a civil lawsuit that came before the U.S. District Court of Hawaii on Monday.

The lawsuit, filed by 17 plaintiffs, seeks damages for injuries resulting from Navy tap water contaminated with jet fuel from the nearby Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in late 2021.

The lawsuit is the first of several filed in Honolulu over water contamination at military housing in and around the joint base. U.S. District Court Judge Leslie Kobayashi is hearing the case without a jury.

Jessup testified that on that day in 2021, he got his son out of the bath and then made sure none of his other three children used water.

That phone call began the family’s months-long saga of experiencing strange new health problems even though they used only bottled water for drinking, cooking and bathing for six months.

In May 2022, his wife and children moved to Arizona and remained separated from Jessup for ten months until he retired ahead of schedule.

Sheena Jessup and the four children are among the plaintiffs, who do not include untrained military personnel. Brian Jessup is a plaintiff in a separate civil case filed last year on behalf of active-duty service members only.

More than 7,500 additional plaintiffs have joined several other lawsuits also seeking damages.

Baths from pans

Many of the thousands of families affected by the contaminated water temporarily moved to hotels for several months while the Navy plugged the well and flushed the system.

The hotel room offered to the Jessups was not suitable for a family of six because it had only two small beds and no Wi-Fi access that the children needed for their studies, Brian Jessup testified.

Instead, they continued to live in their Radford Terrace neighborhood, first using water distributed by the military and, when that ended, buying their own.

Fearful of using the tap water to shower or bathe, the family heated pots of water on the stove and then carried them to the bathroom to sponge them off as best they could, Jessup said.

The entire family experienced symptoms that they believed resulted from contact with the contaminated water, he testified.

Among them were stomach pain, nausea, dizziness and headache. Their oldest son, Beau, now 18, began experiencing tremors in his arms and hands shortly after the infection, which have continued to worsen to this day, Jessup said.

Beau had planned to join the service and follow in his father’s footsteps, but that now seems unlikely because of his tremors, his father testified.

‘Many decisions’

“It was very difficult,” Breanna Jessup testified about the months after the infection.

Bathing became an oppressive chore that changed the family’s routine, she said.

“You couldn’t go out that much,” she said. “You could go to the beach, but with sand all over your body, in your hair and salt water, it just took so much water to get it off.”

After the Navy flushed the water system, Jessup said, she begged her mother to finally let her take a good shower with tap water.

“When I finished showering, I got burns and a rash on my arms,” she testified. “The ones that burned the most were on my forearms. The best way I could describe it is: have you ever been stung by a jellyfish? It stings and burns at the same time.”

Brian Jessup testified that he decided he had to send his family to Arizona, where his wife had grown up.

“I had to make a lot of decisions that I didn’t want to make at the time,” he said.

He said the family couldn’t afford to rent him an apartment in Hawaii either, so he slept on a cot in his office for months.

Happy, healthy life

Brian Jessup said he and his wife are concerned about the future.

“We are very concerned about our children,” he testified. “We want them to live long, happy and healthy lives. It stands to reason that when you are exposed to these chemicals there will be some consequences.”

The government has acknowledged responsibility for the contamination but said the navy’s rapid response prevented widespread and prolonged exposure of residents.

Cross-examination lines by government attorneys since the trial began Monday suggest their defense will argue that the cause of the illnesses residents are experiencing was largely due to pre-existing conditions and stress over the coronavirus pandemic.