Follow the sludge
The turnpike makes a $3.7 million error
Developers should understand the environmental implications of a project before turning a single spadeful of dirt. That’s especially true when the developer is a government agency like the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, which must pay $3.7 million to properly dispose of 66,000 tons of pickle liquor sludge after learning it couldn’t merely rebury the material along the Southern Beltway construction site. Ignorance of environmental requirements does nothing to burnish the agency’s long-tattered image.
Workers found the sludge, likely a steel industry waste product dumped in old mines, during beltway construction in Robinson, Washington County. Test borings had revealed the material, so its discovery was no surprise, and officials planned to return it to the ground permanently until neighbors complained about the smell. The state Department of Environmental Protection then stepped in and notified turnpike officials that the sludge was a hazardous material that had to be taken to a licensed landfill.
According to the Post-Gazette’s Ed Blazina, the turnpike thought it was legal to rebury the material because that’s what it did with sludge dug up during construction of the Mon-Fayette Expressway about a decade ago. However, environmental laws and regulations change every so often, as did Pennsylvania’s requirements regarding sludge disposal. What was permissible a decade ago is impermissible now, a possibility project planners evidently failed to take into consideration.
If the turnpike had known from the beginning about the need to haul away the sludge, it would have included that in its bid specifications and possibly garnered a better price than the $3.7 million it’s now going to pay Independence Excavating of Cleveland through a change order. What the savings might have been will never be known. Of more concern is the turnpike’s need to tamp down project planning, a lesson the agency says it’s learned and will address in a project postmortem.
To its credit, the turnpike has been candid about the oversight, a rarity in this era when government prefers obfuscation and secrecy to accountability. Because the agency promptly dealt with the problem, the DEP won’t fine the turnpike, a lucky break for a cash-strapped agency that’s raised tolls 10 times in as many years.
While the turnpike should have known about its environmental obligation, it would have behooved the DEP to pay closer attention to the project. Although the DEP said the commission at one point promised to provide a plan for handling the sludge, it has no record of receiving it. The DEP says it did remind the commission in a 2005 letter about the need to properly dispose of contaminated soil.
Despite’s the turnpike professed commitment to professionalism, the agency continues to stumble. The pay-to-play scandal that ended in 2014, when the toll road’s former top executives pleaded guilty to conflictof-interest charges, was followed by an inept response to a 2016 snowstorm that trapped more than 500 motorists on the turnpike for more than 24 hours. The agency’s failure to brush up on environmental regulations even once a decade is yet another disappointment.