Douglas County Board raises concerns about local landfill taking Kansas oil spill waste

The U.S. government is ordering railway operator Norfolk Southern to clean up contaminated soil and water at the site of a hazardous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where officials are trying to convince wary residents their tap water is safe to drink.

Douglas County Board members are raising concerns about large amounts of waste from a recent Kansas oil pipeline spill being dumped in the county’s Pheasant Point Landfill in rural Bennington.

They want to know exactly what is in the contaminated soil and other waste that’s being sent to Nebraska from the cleanup of December’s Keystone Pipeline leak of tar sands oil in northeastern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. They want to know the risks of the contaminants. They want to know how chemicals in the soil will be prevented from leaking into the water, soil and air. And they want to know exactly why the material is even being sent to Nebraska in the first place.

“The concern that I have is that we’re receiving waste from an oil spill in Kansas,” County Board member Jim Cavanaugh said Wednesday. “Which raises the question, why isn’t Kansas taking care of their own oil spill waste?”

He and fellow board members Maureen Boyle and Mike Friend raised the questions at the Douglas County Board meeting Tuesday during a presentation by the county’s environmental services director, Kent Holm, on other topics. Holm and Ryle Palmer, site manager for the landfill’s operator, Waste Management, assured them the waste had been deemed safe to put in the Douglas County landfill and would be contained.

But the board members, who said they are hearing concerns from constituents about the waste, were unsatisfied with the answers and insisted on more detailed documents and answers.

“We’re going to have them (Waste Management) come back when they have the right people here to answer the questions,” Boyle said. “They didn’t have an engineer here. They didn’t have their PR people here. ... We want them to be sure to come back and talk to us again so we can get more assurances, so they can answer those questions we were asking.”

The waste is coming from a Dec. 7 oil spill from a rupture in the Keystone Pipeline in rural Washington County, Kansas. The leak spilled nearly 600,000 gallons of oil into Mill Creek and the surrounding land. The pipeline, owned by TC Energy, carries diluted bitumen from Canada to Oklahoma. The corporation, formerly known as TransCanada, proposed to build the Keystone XL pipeline to carry similar material through Nebraska but that plan failed, in large part because of opposition from environmentalists and landowners in Nebraska.

The explanation provided to the County Board for why the waste was being shipped to Douglas County instead of staying in Kansas: Waste Management bid for the contract to dispose of it, and Pheasant Point is about as close and is better equipped to handle it than a Waste Management landfill in Kansas.

Holm told the County Board that he could approve the disposal of the waste in Douglas County because of “special event authorization” authority the County Board gave him in 2009.

“This is a very similar project to a lot of others that we’ve had,” Holm said. “The reason these things go into this particular landfill ... is because they have the protections they have, the liners and the other protections that are needed to be able to contain particular material.”

He said the county trusts Waste Management “because they have the permitting through the state and the federal authorities to do it in a way that protects groundwater.”

Holm said Waste Management is “very diligent” about analyzing the materials coming in and “have had numerous analytical studies done on this particular product.”

Cavanaugh pressed for a copy of a document showing such a study. Palmer said that TC Energy owns those reports and that he would give the board contact information for TC Energy.

Lisa Disbrow, a spokeswoman for Waste Management, said by email Wednesday that the company will send someone with more expertise to answer the board’s questions.

The World-Herald found answers to some of the County Board’s questions in documents from the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy and in interviews Wednesday with representatives of that department and Waste Management.

A document on the NDEE’s website, an application from TransCanada Keystone Pipeline to dispose of the waste in a landfill near Topeka, Kansas, says that it contains “crude oil impacted soil, vegetation, wood, plastic, absorbents, PPE, hoses, boom, and animal carcass.” The document says 75,000 cubic yards of waste would be deposited over six months.

The document says the material includes a “heavy crude oil” mixed with materials to dilute it. Under a category titled “hazardous ingredients of material,” the document lists bitumen, hydrocarbon diluent, benzene and hydrogen sulphide.”

Cavanaugh said he was particularly concerned about the possibility that the waste included benzene, which has been determined to cause cancer in people.

The documents on the NDEE website also include a laboratory analysis of the waste. A memo says that the department’s compliance staff had reviewed the analysis and confirmed Kansas and federal determinations that the material is “nonhazardous solid waste.”

Asked if the NDEE had approved the disposal in Douglas County, a department spokeswoman said by email, “The petroleum contaminated soil generated from the TC Energy pipeline release cleanup in Kansas was reviewed by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) and the EPA, and it was deemed a nonhazardous solid waste, which can be disposed of at any permitted solid waste landfill. The Pheasant Point facility is permitted to accept nonhazardous solid waste for disposal, and does not need to seek additional approval from NDEE for waste it’s already permitted to accept.”

Asked specifically about the benzene, the spokeswoman said it is “present at a non-hazardous level” according to Nebraska state waste regulations.

Disbrow said a third-party certified lab analyzed samples of the waste.

“The waste materials were determined to be non-hazardous waste based on the State of Nebraska’s regulations,” Disbrow said. “Pheasant Point only accepts non-hazardous solid waste materials as allowed by the Nebraska Department of Environment & Energy.”

She said the landfill’s “disposal area or ‘cells’ are engineered with a composite liner (2-ft thick compacted clay and a 60-mil thickness of polyethylene geomembrane liner).” The landfill also has a system of groundwater monitoring wells, part of the permit requirements, that allows the “landfill to continually monitor and ensure the solid wastes materials disposed are not impacting our community’s groundwater.”

Cavanaugh said Wednesday that the board will continue to follow up.

“I’m going to make sure that we do get the answers,” he said. “It’s just responsible environmental stewardship to make sure that our air, soil and water are protected in Douglas County.”

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[email protected], 402-444-1057, twitter.com/CHRISBURBACH

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