Landfill ordered to stop piping runoff
Judge’s action focuses on Belle Vernon plant
Fayette County Common Pleas Judge Steve Leskinen has ordered the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill in Rostraver to stop piping runoff contaminated by shale gas drilling and fracking waste chemicals to the Belle Vernon sewage treatment plant.
The judge granted a temporary injunction against the landfill Friday afternoon, based on a joint request from Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower and Washington County District Attorney Eugene Vittone II.
The injunction, effective immediately, prohibits the landfill from sending contaminated wastewater, known as leachate, to the sewage treatment plant and also prohibits the plant from discharging wastewater containing “contaminated chemicals” from the landfill into the Monongahela River. A hearing on a permanent injunction is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Friday.
Neither the sewage treatment plant in Fayette County nor the landfill in Westmoreland County is in Washington County, but Mr. Vittone said many communities that use the river for their public water supplies are.
The injunction was granted just two days after the Belle Vernon Municipal Authority decided to stop accepting the leachate from the landfill because it is damaging
the biological sewage treatment process and causing the illegal discharge of poorly treated wastewater into the river.
Most of the leachate is produced by rainwater that falls on the landfill and seeps through the garbage and the drilling and fracking waste material, picking up contaminants. The leachate is collected by underground drains and channeled into a pipe that runs about 3 miles to the treatment plant.
The landfill, owned by Uniontown-based Nobel Environmental Inc., was piping an average of 100,000 gallons of leachate a day to the sewage treatment plant, double the amount allowed in the contract, said Guy Kruppa, the sewage plant supervisor.
He said testing done by the authority shows the leachate contains high levels of ammonia, total suspended solids, and a host of chemicals and compounds consistent with shale gas drilling and fracking waste, including volatile organic compounds, magnesium, barium, phenols, and oil and grease.
That concentrated cocktail of chemical compounds is killing the “bugs” that digest the sewage, Mr. Kruppa said, and inhibiting the sewage plant’s ability to treat the waste before it is discharged into the river.
The state Department of Environmental Protection, which has permitting and enforcement duties for both the landfill and the sewage treatment plant, had urged the municipal authority to continue accepting the runoff, while the landfill builds a new pre-treatment facility. It even proposed an arrangement in which the landfill would pay any past and future fines levied against the sewage plant for illegal discharges into the river.
Mr. Kruppa said Wednesday that such a pay-to-pollute arrangement “isn’t ethically right,” and on Friday he said the injunction was sought to “force the landfill to stop and shut off the pipe.”
Ro Rozier, a spokeswoman for the landfill owner, responded to a request for comment Friday with an email saying, “Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill never received a copy of the contract termination notice from the Belle Vernon Municipal Authority. We never received a complaint or copy of the court order. We have only received this information through the media.
In good faith, WSL has decided to shut off the pipe even though we are not in violation of any water quality standards.
We do have approved alternatives for disposal of the waste water which will begin immediately. We will continue making large investments in onsite technology to improve leachate quality that will exceed government standards.”
The Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill, which has also gone by the name Tervita Rostraver Township Sanitary Landfill, began accepting oil and gas “drill cuttings” in August 2010, according to the DEP.
In 2017 it accepted a total of 119,716 tons of shale gas drilling and fracking waste, or 40% of its total waste stream. That’s a sharp increase over the shale gas cuttings it took in during the previous three years, but only half of the 80% allowed by its DEP permit.
The landfill’s annual operations report for 2018, which will contain the amount of shale gas drilling and fracking waste it accepted, isn’t available until June 30, but the landfill said tonnage did not increase. Because the region had wetter than usual weather last year, leachate runoff did increase.
Belle Vernon Mayor Gerald Jackson, who sits on the authority board that terminated its contract with the landfill Wednesday, giving it 14 days to shut off the leachate flow, said officials in communities along the river support the injunction.