At some point this year, personnel at Joint Base Andrews realized they were missing tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel.

The base’s fuel system had failed a leak safety test in early December. In January and February, it had lost about 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, but staff believed the leak was contained to the base. Then on March 23, someone on the base spotted oil on the freshwater creek that starts on the sprawling Prince George’s County, Maryland military facility.

That day the Defense Department finally called the state.

For an unknown period of time, jet fuel had been spilling into the Piscataway Creek, which feeds into the Potomac River.

Late March was the first time the state of Maryland had heard of any issues at the base, despite strict state regulations that require the facility to immediately disclose leaks. It took roughly two more weeks for the Defense Department to disclose the full extent of the spillage — this one from a second leak in the system.

In all, the base, which houses Air Force One, has lost about 32,000 gallons of jet fuel between the two leaks. No one knows exactly how much of that fuel has contaminated the creek.

Now, Maryland regulators and the state’s congressional delegation want to know why the Defense Department took so long to tell them something was wrong.

“There’s an equation with a lot of blank spaces that have to be filled in,” said Adam Ortiz, the deputy secretary of the Maryland Department of the Environment. “That’s why the rules are what they are. People are supposed to report immediately.”

NOTUS obtained 26 pages of Maryland’s inspection documents for the jet-fuel leak at Joint Base Andrews, which include reviews of the base’s records. The previously unreported documents reveal that the base for months failed to disclose fuel safety issues at their facilities — problems that ultimately led to serious environmental pollution.

“Efforts to properly control, contain, and clean up the release of fuel have been minimal and insufficient,” Maryland’s inspectors wrote in an April 15 report. “Deadlines are now considered past due.”

Maryland learned about the failed December test in late March and early April, after someone at Joint Base Andrews noticed an oil sheen on the creek and the smell of petroleum. The base reported the spill to the state that same day.

“The Air Force is currently investigating actions surrounding the reported December 11 pressure test failure,” a Joint Base Andrews spokesperson told NOTUS. “More information will be provided once the investigation is complete.”

This is the second time in less than six months that Maryland officials have been at odds with the Trump administration over pollution impacting the local waterways. About three months ago, the Trump administration attacked Maryland over a sewage spill in the Potomac River — one that occurred on a pipe overseen by the federal government.

Luckily, in both cases, Maryland has escaped a public health crisis; the leak from Joint Base Andrews happened south of the drinking water intakes for D.C. and Maryland. But yet again, the infrastructure failure in this situation exacerbated serious environmental problems.

It also created yet another tension point between Maryland officials and the Trump administration over how to jointly govern land around the nation’s capital. No one has a clear picture yet of how much it will cost to clean the fuel up, multiple sources in state offices told NOTUS.

“Maryland Department of the Environment and Joint Base Andrews are collaborating on methods to identify the full extent of the plume. It is an iterative and ongoing effort,” the Joint Base Andrews spokesperson said.

Maryland’s federal lawmakers — with the exception of the delegation’s sole Republican, Rep. Andy Harris — sent a letter asking the base the same question the state regulators did: What caused the delay in reporting the extent of the spill?

“Please provide a detailed timeline of when each leak was first detected, internally reported, and externally communicated,” reads the lawmakers’ letter to the Air Force, which Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s office shared with NOTUS.

The Environmental Protection Agency deployed staff to assess the condition of Piscataway Creek on March 25, the agency said. “Containment measures were working as intended, no oil or oil sheen was observed migrating off site,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement to NOTUS.

But after the EPA’s site visit, the initial containment measures failed twice during heavy rainfall, according to Maryland officials.

The base told NOTUS that it then installed more “robust” containment measures that “held through heavy rain on April 19 and during subsequent rain events,” a spokesperson said.

“Joint Base Andrews has been taking appropriate actions to contain and clean up the spill on their property,” the EPA spokesperson said.

In late April, water samples tested by Maryland regulators both on and off of the base showed evidence of toxic chemicals that are associated with petroleum products.

A team of contractors on the base has been trying to suck out the leaked fuel from the contaminated zone, but the state of Maryland says it still doesn’t know much has been gathered so far.

Maryland inspectors balked at the methods the Defense Department initially used to measure how much fuel had been removed from the creek. “JBA and their contractors have failed to properly evaluate recovered petroleum impacted liquids to permit quantification of liquid phase hydrocarbon (LPH) recovery,” an April 15 inspection document read, calling the techniques used by the base “not a proper method.”

The state says it still has far more questions than answers.

“JBA has failed to provide the total amount of [liquid phase hydrocarbon] recovered. JBA has failed to document the daily and cumulative totals of LPH recovered in the daily reports,” the regulators said in the internal report.

“The fuel response contractor is measuring the amount of jet fuel on the surface of the recovered water and providing these data to MDE daily since April 18,” the JBA spokesperson said.

Maryland regulators have not regularly dealt with significant jet-fuel leaks from airports or military bases. The most recent leak of comparable size occurred in Hawaii in 2021, when the Defense Department spilled about 20,000 gallons of jet fuel into an aquifer that led to a monthslong drinking water crisis.

The communities alongside Piscataway Creek have long had to deal with environmental pollution from Joint Base Andrews. The firefighting foam the military uses for training and emergencies has left behind forever chemicals that require costly and complex cleanups. That has yet to happen.

A spokesperson for Joint Base Andrews did not provide any details about the timeline for PFAS cleanup. Trump’s Defense Department has delayed forever chemical cleanup timelines across the country, The New York Times reported.

Since 2021, Maryland has advised against eating fish from Piscataway Creek, putting limits in place after researchers found unusually high concentrations of forever chemicals in multiple species.

The concentrations were so high that people involved in the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, a nonprofit organization that monitors the health of the Potomac River Basin, told NOTUS that they worry that the advisories do not go far enough to educate the public about the risks.

The Potomac Riverkeeper Network is concerned about the environmental effects from both the jet fuel spill and from PFAS, and they are especially worried about the slow communication from the Defense Department.

“Maryland is saying that the Air Force was very late — weeks, possibly months — in notifying the state. For us, that is really troubling,” said David Flores, the vice president and general counsel for the network.

“We have been, and remain, really concerned about PFAS contamination,” Flores said. “Especially here, where there are so many people living near the base at the fence line, with people using a waterway that was affected by PFAS unequivocally in Piscataway Creek. I think our expectation is that there would be a sense of urgency on the part of the Air Force and the federal government as a whole to address the contamination.”

With the fish consumption advisory already in place and the National Park Service already prohibiting swimming in Piscataway Creek, officials have not had to assess whether to put limits in place based solely on the jet-fuel leak.

State officials are now confident that jet fuel is no longer leaking directly into the creek. But they also don’t know the precise location of the leaked fuel, how much of it has sunk into the soil, or what exactly went wrong with the fuel system in the first place. Until they get those answers, both regulators and the Potomac Riverkeeper Network are concerned about jet fuel continuing to seep into the groundwater from underneath the base. The base sits on the headwaters of Piscataway Creek, meaning that water bubbles up from springs in the earth and feeds the creek somewhere nearby or underneath where the jet fuel leaked into the ground.

Because there is no map of the headwaters and no map yet of where the jet fuel has contaminated the soil, there‘s no way to know what the future risks are for the surrounding environment and for the Potomac River.

“The community is unquestionably an overburdened community from a pollution standpoint. So it’s incumbent on us and the base to have a higher sensitivity and to go the extra mile because this community certainly has had more than its fair share of pollution,” Ortiz said.

“We’re working closely with the command staff to ensure more timely and accurate reporting going forward to meet the state’s standards,” he added.