Mushroom plant cleans compost spill at Tar Creek
MIAMI — In his rising 25-year career at J-M Farms from a college grad running equipment in the compost yard to growing operations manager, Scott Engelbrecht found a low point last week.
It was located about 7,000 meandering feet outside the Miami-based mushroom plant, about three-quarters of a mile as the crow flies, where an unnamed, weedy drainage ditch that passes near the plant connects with Tar Creek, the endangered namesake for one of the biggest Superfund sites in the United States.
He and Oklahoma Department of Agriculture inspectors got permission to cross a neighbor’s lands and they tracked the drainage to where a liquid known as “compost tea” from the mushroom farm spilled into the creek. Thousands of fish were dying.
“It was a sinking feeling, a sinking feeling,” he said.
It was blow for a creek that is recovering from decades of heavy-metal and acid poisoning left from zinc and lead mining operations, although just a week after the spill it seemed to be recovering. It was also a blow for the company and its employees and owners, Engelbrecht said.
“We live here, we work here, we play here,” he said. “We want to be good neighbors.”
He agreed to give the Tulsa World a tour to explain what happened and show what the company has been doing to “try to get this fixed.” It also may be a cautionary tale for other operations statewide with similar plumbing and equipment in use.
On June 22, Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, Golden Valley Electric Association and Oklahoma Department of Agriculture inspectors responded to a report of a spill on Tar Creek that turned the water dark for about 2 miles and killed thousands of fish. When inspectors tracked the source of the dark water they came to Engelbrecht at J-M.
“It was a faulty joint in their piping,” said Jeremy Seiger, director of environmental management services for the Ag Department. “Unfortunately, it was just underground and fairly close to that drainage so that’s where it collected.”
At J-M, the soil used to grow mushrooms is a carefully controlled and, at times in the process, sterilized material. It starts as compost in large piles that are exposed to the elements in order to create what amounts to potting soil through the composting process. Raw materials are gathered, mixed and piled on a 200,000-square-foot concrete pad with a drainage trough that connects to a holding pond. That pond connects to a second pond through a 5-inch diameter PVC sewer pipe with pumps used to manage pond depths and aeration.
The PVC pipe comes in 20-foot lengths with glued joints. The same piping is used in residential sewer systems. One of those joints is what broke.
Other agriculture operations that may have collection ponds with pipes that run out into fields where land-application fertilizer operations take place use the same pipe, Seiger said. He could only guess that it was an aging pipe joint that eventually gave way.
“I would say, at least from the Department of Agriculture standpoint, a scenario or situation like this doesn’t happen very frequently,” he said.
“It’s low pressure, high volume; it moves 500 gallons per minute,” Engelbrecht said of the piping system. It is unknown how long the break may have been leaking.
“It was back in the weeds where you wouldn’t notice it,” he said.
The pipe has been repaired and isn’t in use anymore, anyway, he said. Once the cleanup is complete the pipe will be replaced with new heavyduty piping similar to gas pipe, which has fewer joints. What few there are, are welded.
The overflow ponds have at least 1 million gallons of capacity each as part of a regulated and designedto-specification commercial composting operation under Department of Ag guidelines, he said.
“It’s enough capacity to handle a major, 24-hour rain event, up to 9 or 10 inches of rain in a 24-hour period,” he said.
The ponds hold leachate, or what Engelbrecht called “compost tea.” Water is required to make the composting operation turn raw ingredients — wheat straw, chicken litter, cottonseed meal, gypsum and some added urea — into soil. Rainfall provides some water and if more is needed the water from the collection ponds is re-used.
The company takes pride in making productive use of byproducts from other agriculture operations, Engelbrecht said. Thousands of yards of its compost have been used in minefield restoration work to replenish soil, as well as in new operations created to purify mining waters, he said.
DEQ spokeswoman Erin Hatfield reported preliminary Tar Creek water test results showed “high levels of nutrients, particularly ammonia and other nitrogen compounds, downstream of the release. There were also high levels of organic matter in the same areas. It appears this combination caused the oxygen levels in the stream to drop below that needed for fish to survive.”
Six days and more than an inch of rain later, Tar Creek was already looking better and small fish could be seen swimming in the water just below the affected drainage, now dammed off by a series of three earthen berms erected by contractors directed by Engelbrecht.
Friday, pumper-trucks ran back-and-forth to pull water out of the drainage and take it back to the holding ponds. Over five days they had moved about 130,000 gallons, with much more to come. Meanwhile, another company was working on establishing 7,000 feet of heavy-duty hose and a series of pumps to push water up to the ponds.
“The trucks are working, but we want this to go faster,” Engelbrecht said.
“Once we are satisfied with what we see, we will do inspections and water sampling again and it will be up to the Ag Department when we remove the berms,” he said.
“We like to think, you know up to this point, we’ve been a big part of helping to make Tar Creek what it is today, relative to what it was many years ago. So that’s, obviously, why this hurts even more that this happened,” Engelbrecht said.
“We like being part of the solution and we like our record of being good environmental stewards but, unfortunately this happened, and hopefully what we’re doing now is going to make up for some of that. We’re going to try to get this fixed and get it back to where it was before. We are committed to that.”