In November 2021, 93,000 people living near the U.S. military’s strategic fuel storage facility near Honolulu, Hawaii woke up to find their drinking water contaminated with toxic jet fuel. 27,000 gallons had leaked into the aquifer near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Now more than 2,500 plaintiffs who have dealt with the side effects of ingesting jet fuel joined a lawsuit asking the government for up to $1.25 million each in damages.

The fuel storage facility known as Red Hill was the largest in the Pacific and was built during World War II. The fuel was stored in miles of tunnels up to 20 stories underground to provide as much as 250 million gallons of strategic fuel reserves for the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

Trial Lawyer Kristina Baehr of Just Well Law is representing the military families and civilians suing the U.S. government for the water contamination at Red Hill.

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“The government calls it contamination, and our clients call it poisoning because that’s what happened. The government knew it was contaminated and let them use it,” Baehr said in an interview with Fox News.

Baehr says her clients have a wide range of long term symptoms including Parkinson’s and seizures.

This case is personal for Baehr. After her own family experienced toxic exposure, she decided to leave her job at the Department of Justice to represent families like her own.

“They are coming forward not for themselves, but for everybody else to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We can’t be mission ready as a country if we’re sick or if our people are sick,” Baehr said of the thousands she is representing in the lawsuit.

The case is named for Jaclyn Hughes and her family. Hughes had just given birth to her son, Maverick, at the time of the leak. Just days after he was born, he was covered in red rashes, and Hughes’s own throat immediately began to burn after drinking the water in their home.

Hughes’s husband deployed with the U.S. Navy at the time of the leak. He missed the birth of their son and when he got home to meet Maverick, the water had an oily sheen and smelled of gasoline, Hughes explained.

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“My husband was forward deployed at the time. He missed the birth of his son. He came home when he was five days old to meet him. To come home to jet fuel in our drinking water and have to deploy again, leaving us in the hands of the Navy he was sworn to protect, to have us refused care, denied, gaslit, and to this day not have all the appropriate care that we need for our daughter,” Hughes told Fox.

Their daughter Kyla, who was just four years old at the time of the leak, went into a full psychosis, Hughes said.

“When Kyla started experiencing her symptoms, she went from a happy-go-lucky four-year-old little girl that went into full psychosis. We went through her being a normal functioning in school to not being able to leave our house for months at a time because of her level of disability,” Hughes said.

The Hughes family. (Courtesy of Jaclyn Hughes)

Aurora Briggs, another plaintiff, was 22-years-old at the time of the leak. She was living in civilian housing on land owned by the U.S. Navy with her younger siblings and her mom. Briggs has dealt with dozens of symptoms ranging from a sore throat to memory loss and brain fog. Living in Arizona now, she has had trouble getting care.

It is not every day a doctor is told the patients’ symptoms stem from long-term exposure to jet fuel, Briggs explained.

“The list is so long that we have a binder just to keep track of all the different conditions, symptoms, doctor’s appointments, and everything. It’s extensive,” Briggs said.

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Of her symptoms, Briggs said, “I feel like I have dementia because I just get to the point where I can’t remember things, and I struggle with, you know, even thinking of words. Sometimes just talking is a struggle.”

Both Hughes and Briggs find the U.S. Navy at fault for how the leak was dealt with.

“The institution of the Navy grossly mishandled this. Specifically, those who were in charge of communicating to us in testing, in maintenance and in handling all of the Red Hill contamination. We are a proud Navy family. My husband serves, he is underway as we speak. Our family has served. We feel betrayed by the institution that was supposed to be protecting us,” Hughes said.

Aurora in the hospital after experiencing symptoms from ingesting jet fuel. (Courtesy of Aurora Briggs)

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the Red Hill facility closed in March 2022. 12.4 million gallons of diesel and 93 million gallons of jet fuel had to be moved to multiple locations in the Indo-Pacific area of command.

But, Baehr said the Navy still hasn’t cleaned up the jet fuel still sticking to the pipes. Families are still reporting a sheen in the water and an oily smell.

“What we know either way is that there’s a sheen in the water. People are reporting symptoms. The EPA is concerned and the Navy is continuing to turn a blind eye. So no, that water is not safe. We’ve got a situation where people are still sick who were there in November of 2021. And the water is still not safe.”

The U.S. Navy pushed back on this claim in a statement to Fox News.

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“After the initial spill in November 2021 the Navy took immediate action to recover (flush) the system and implemented a robust sampling program.  The Navy also disconnected the affected well and ensured all drinking water was provided from a different shaft,” the statement read.

The Navy told Fox it has taken 9,000 samples to EPA-approved labs and found the water now meets state and federal safety standards. The Navy noted the Hawaii Department of Health confirmed through its own independent investigation that no petroleum or jet fuel compounds were detected in drinking water samples collected at or near the Navy base.

But there is a long road ahead to deal with the fallout from the leak.

“We as the families impacted in the thousands need to hear them say, yes, you were injured by this. There are kids that are sick. There are kids that need long term care. There needs to be accountability,” Hughes said.

San Franciscans had mixed reactions while sounding off on a recent study that dubbed their city the “worst run” in the United States for the second year in a row.

The ranking comes courtesy of WalletHub, a personal finance company that measured the “effectiveness of local leadership” by comparing the quality of city services matched against the city’s total budget to determine its operating efficiency. Their “Best & Worst-Run Cities in America” report casts an analytical eye on 148 sizeable U.S. cities, scrutinizing their performance across several critical service categories and 36 key metrics, while also considering their per-capita spending.

“The best-run cities in America use their budgets most effectively to provide high-quality financial security, education, health, safety and transportation to their residents. Many of the top cities also have a very low amount of outstanding government debt per capita, which can prevent financial troubles in the future,” WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe explained in a report detailing the study earlier this month.

Despite coming in at 24 in quality of services, analysts placed San Francisco last in its total budget per-capita rank, along with having the highest amount of long-term debt outstanding. The city ranked 148th overall.

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“I’m not surprised at all,” Tom Wong, a lifelong San Francisco resident who owns a private security firm in the area, told Fox News Digital of the ranking last Monday. “What we have in San Francisco is not a problem of governance. We have a problem with criminals in governance.”

Wong, a Republican, has voiced his dissent with local officials multiple times, including on the Fox News Channel and the FOX Business Network. When asked what he believes caused many of the city’s issues he identified, he restated that dissent.

“The progressive movement is not about making things better. It’s about how much they could grift before it bellies up,” he said. “They’re pushing the limits of how much people will tolerate beforehand so, in order to fix what we have in the city, we need to change just about everything… The city’s broken. That’s because every level of governance is corrupt.”

A second respondent, who asked to remain anonymous, also agreed with WalletHub’s findings.

“As a New Yorker that has been here in San Francisco for well over a decade, I would say, yeah, it’s pretty poorly run. I wouldn’t argue with the findings,” she told Fox News Digital during an interview last Wednesday.

“The budget is $49 billion, and so I think a lot of people and the residents of the city wonder where that money’s going. We know that it’s going to inflated salaries or whatever, but why aren’t they paying teachers and cops? Teachers sometimes have to pay out of their own pocket for supplies for their classrooms, and we’re understaffed with cops. We can’t attract talent because cops aren’t respected here.”

The respondent identified herself as a “left-leaning progressive” who has become more moderate over time. When asked for her thoughts on city leadership, she pointed out a great divide between progressive Democrats and moderates.

“The city supervisors are split. They prevent Mayor Breed from doing her job. We have a lot of city supervisors that are just really toxic, and they are just bottlenecks for Breed,” she said, particularly naming Supervisors Connie Chan, Hillary Ronen, Dean Preston and Shamann Walton.

“They literally oppose law and order,” she added.

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San Francisco Mayor London Breed listens at a press conference at City Hall on Feb. 16, 2022, in San Francisco, California. Breed criticized WalletHub’s report, calling it “misleading and inaccurate.” (Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Ben Wang, owner of San Francisco clothing store Dare Fashion, offered a different take on the study. While speaking to Fox News Digital last Thursday, he emphasized San Francisco’s unbreakable spirit and its longstanding reputation as a progressive haven, where people could go if they felt they didn’t belong anywhere else.

“I totally disagree that San Francisco is the ‘worst-run’ city,” he said.

“I mean, I don’t know because I don’t live in another city,” he continued. “But it might be a little bit unfair because most of the bigger cities on there [the study] have lower ratings… and that makes a lot of sense because problems get more complicated when you have a bigger city and more diverse neighborhoods, and it doesn’t work all over the city. Whereas smaller cities tend to be a bit more homogenous.” 

Wang additionally disagreed with the study’s general premise and methodology. 

“Philosophically, I don’t agree with these types of rating systems because you’re trying to take something that’s very complicated and put it into a numbered list,” he said.

“As a former scientist, I can understand doing some sort of what’s called a multivariate analysis. You’re putting a lot of variables into something, and you’re trying to get it into one metric, but I didn’t see anything that took into account the size of the city, the population of the city or the population density, as a factor in their multivariate analysis. Without those factors, New York City is really low on their list. So is Los Angeles, so is San Francisco, because I feel like maybe a factor was being left out, which is actually very important.” 

Wang feels that pinning the blame on city officials is largely unfair, given the complex nature of commonly-cited problems like drug use and homelessness. He emphasized the need to “dig around for the roots of the problem” instead of blaming those problems on the people who are trying to fix them, even if their efforts sometimes might not yield positive results.

“Where did this problem start? A lot of the homelessness comes from habitual heroin users, and where did they start? I think Big Pharma started that problem with the opioid crisis, pumping out cheap pills, and telling people they weren’t going to get addicted, and they did.”

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Ina Coolbrith Park, San Francisco, California, USA. (iStock)

Despite the respondents each having their own take on the study, they shared a few common themes. For one, they had all witnessed crime to some extent.  

Tom Wong, for instance, told FOX Business’ Ashley Webster last year that his private security firm had been rattled by thieves – both the physical business location and vehicle break-ins as well.

“Safety-wise, it’s not good,” he said of the crime conditions in San Francisco last week. “The reason being is that a lot of the crime is being underreported because there are not enough detectives, so the police are not responding to a lot of calls. The business owners, the homeowners are so fed up that they don’t even report the crime.”

Law enforcement, he elaborated, tends to go after more violent crimes under the assumption that insurance will help cover expenses incurred from burglaries.

“After dark, it’s a Third World country,” he added.

Despite his fashion shop being robbed twice in the last three years – with the most recent incident costing the business a whopping $300K that forced him to set up a GoFundMe page to help alleviate the cost – Ben Wang remains determined not to give up on San Francisco.

“I think it’s a big problem,” he said when asked about crime. Linking back to his cause-and-effect example of Big Pharma instigating drug usage and homelessness, he added that income inequality exacerbated by the COVID pandemic made poorer residents more desperate and therefore more likely to commit crimes.

“I love that San Francisco is a very progressive place, and that the whole idea of this place is that we’re going to try new things. The environmental movement started here, all these cool things, Dotcom and the Silicon Valley… it encourages people to try new things, which is fantastic. One of the things that we tried was not prosecuting, shoplifting and small crimes and also going easier on drug crimes and users and all that stuff, and it didn’t work out well,” he added.

The anonymous respondent shared an experience from her own neighborhood, when a nearby abandoned home was burglarized earlier this year.

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“The cops are called at 2:30 in the morning on a Monday morning, and you have a bunch of SFPD respond to this call. You could see that the gate was broken. You could see that there was a light on. You could see that there were burglars in the house. The cops even had nest cam footage showing the casing and them coming back with crowbars and flashlights. You had all the evidence,” she said. 

“My husband dealt with the cops and the neighbors. I went back to bed. When I woke up at 8:30 in the morning, their getaway car was still parked outside. The cops left the burglars inside the house because they stated that there wasn’t a homeowner to give them permission to enter the house.”

Meanwhile, Mayor London Breed called WalletHub’s ranking “misleading and inaccurate” because she said the study compared San Francisco’s city and county budget with other cities, which only have city budgets, according to FOX 2, an affiliate based in San Francisco,

The report highlighted her previous remarks from her State of the City Address, where she said, “I’m tired of the people who talk about San Francisco as if our troubles are inevitable and our successes a fluke. Our successes are not a fluke, and they’re not fleeting,” adding, “They’re the product of years of hard work, collaboration, investment, creativity, and perseverance. They’re the output of thousands of people, in government and out, who believe in service not cynicism.” 

All three respondents have their own unique bond with the city – and each raved about it in their own way.

“It is the most beautiful place,” Wong said, adding later, “There’s plenty of good food here.”

The second respondent had some similar opinions to share. “There’s a lot of creative, smart people that live here. We have excellent culture and food. The weather is amazing. We’re close in proximity to Big Sur and Napa. And, if you feel like you need services – not that I do – but it’s nice to know that those services are available to people.”

“You just can’t kill the spirit [of the city],” Wang said.  “That’s what San Francisco has been from the times of the Gold Rush. Chinese people came here early… this was always a place that there was opportunity… Even if it’s taking us a little longer, and we should be backpedaling from some misguided policy or things that we tried that didn’t work, I just I find it difficult to believe that you’re going to really kill the spirit of the city.”

Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.

It might’ve actually been fitting that the first hours of NBA free agency were unexpectedly quiet for the Nuggets. Too quiet.

There will be roster moves in Denver. That’s a certainty. Vlatko Cancar and DeAndre Jordan are each likely to return on one-year deals, league sources told The Denver Post, and that still leaves two roster spots unoccupied. The Nuggets will be able to use the $5.2 million taxpayer mid-level exception to fill one of those. They are staying active in the trade market as well, even kicking the tires on Russell Westbrook.

But yes, it’s fitting that no concrete roster additions occurred Sunday between the start of free agent negotiations (4 p.m. MT) and the print deadlines of the local newspaper. While the Nuggets’ front office was busy, no doubt, the rest of Denver was stuck with nothing to reflect on except a loss.

What does the departure of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to Orlando, reported first by USA TODAY’s Jeff Zillgitt, for three years and $66 million mean?

First off, it’s not as simple as a downright indictment of ownership’s willingness to spend, nor does it set a precedent that Denver will never be a second-apron team under any circumstance during the life of this CBA. The Nuggets, according to The Athletic, showed serious interest in trading for Paul George before the draft, for example.

A league source confirmed to The Post that Denver was briefly in talks with the Clippers about George, though it’s questionable how far along those conversations got. An extend-and-trade would have required Michael Porter Jr., Zeke Nnaji and draft picks. What’s the point of that information? Interest in a player of George’s pedigree and salary, especially as an outsider rather than as the team drafting and developing that player, indicates a pretty clear openness to spending.

Choosing whether to wade into the second-apron morass is about more than whether an owner is too cheap to pay the luxury tax bill. It’s a question of whether certain moves, certain contracts, are worth sacrificing roster flexibility. If the Nuggets went into the second apron to keep Caldwell-Pope, they would not have been able to even entertain a trade like that one. So far, the Nuggets have given no reason to believe they won’t exceed the second apron if they view it to be worth the competitive risks. General manager Calvin Booth said as much after the season ended.

“I think for me personally, it’s win a championship, one. Two, we have to look at the overall financial picture. And three, second apron,” he said then when asked about Caldwell-Pope. “And I know the second apron is daunting, and there’s all kinds of restrictions, but I don’t think that’s first on our priority list.”

The overall financial picture includes more than just this free agency cycle. It includes a future when Denver could be trying to juggle increased salaries for Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon with extensions for Christian Braun and Peyton Watson. What if that duo is on the rise two offseasons from now, and Caldwell-Pope is starting to decline? Being on the hook for $22 million to a 33-year-old Caldwell-Pope could come back to bite. Only time can tell.

Anyway, in a more immediate sense: The loss of Caldwell-Pope despite possessing his full Bird rights reads as a full-hearted bet on Braun, whose most recent impression was out-defending KCP against Minnesota in the playoffs.

They’re very different players. (Make no mistake: As of July 2024, Caldwell-Pope is a better one.) Defensively, Braun might not be quite as tenacious a screen navigator as KCP, but he’s much bigger for a two-guard. He’s a formidable point-of-attack and help defender already at age 23, and he can hold his own in the post against other physically overpowering guards and forwards, from LeBron James to Anthony Edwards to Luka Doncic. Considering that Braun is only two years into his NBA career, it’s reasonable to believe he’s on his way to being regarded as an elite wing defender in the same light as Caldwell-Pope.

The offensive fit is the biggest uncertainty. Braun plays at a fast, downhill pace with the ball — athletic and fearless at its best, rushed and messy at its worst — that doesn’t theoretically mesh with the methodical, cerebral identity of Denver’s starting lineup. However, Nikola Jokic has always rewarded good cutters, and Braun does have a good feel for when to pounce on open space or dive to the rim. If anyone can optimize his off-ball effectiveness, it’s this lineup.

Of course, shooting is an inevitable aspect of good off-ball offense as well. Only Braun can optimize that for himself. Nuggets coach Michael Malone has labeled Braun’s 3-point percentage as a defining factor in his potential as a starter.

Braun is more than fine above the break — 42.9% last season to Caldwell-Pope’s 39.6%. But KCP shot 11% better in the corners on way higher volume. That’s an area where Braun needs to keep developing his shot if the Nuggets want effective floor-spacing with him planted there. It could also benefit him to diversify his midrange game. He barely attempted any shots outside the paint but inside the arc last season, and he only made 32% of his shots in the midrange. Jokic is one of the best dribble handoff centers in the NBA, and he got efficient value out of Caldwell-Pope by turning DHOs into 15-foot pull-up jumpers.

Only 10 players in the NBA attempted more shots out of DHOs and made them at a higher rate than Caldwell-Pope (43.2% on 88 attempts). He was even more effective than Porter within that play-type, according to the NBA’s data. As of now, swapping in Braun means subtracting that skillset.

But even if Braun doesn’t develop that, he makes up for the subtraction with the addition of his off-the-dribble upside. He’s not a great ball-handler, but he has the strength and gumption to drive into traffic and finish through contact, unlike Caldwell-Pope. If Braun can refine that and eliminate the inconsistency, it would add a new layer to a starting lineup that lacks burst off the dribble. Opponents will dare Braun to attack them when the ball finds him within the flow of Denver’s offense. He’ll be thrown into the fire quickly.

Ultimately, Braun has displayed the two-way athleticism and early signs of shooting prowess to prove to Denver’s front office that he’s worth a vote of confidence. He had a 15.4 net rating last season when he shared the floor with Jokic, and if Caldwell-Pope’s minutes are to translate even somewhat directly to Braun next season, it means the KU alum is about to be on the court with Jokic more than any other Nugget.

But until further notice, Sunday was the end of a miniature era: the day the Nuggets had to forfeit their claim to the title of Best Starting Five in the NBA.

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