Water-quality bid fields 2 comments
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality received two public comments on a petition to change the state’s water quality standards while Houston-based Halliburton Energy Services Inc. works to clean up an abandoned mine site that has been polluting waters in southwest Arkansas for decades.
The comments from the Arkansas Department of Health and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were not specifically in favor or against the project. The comment period on the petition ended Tuesday.
Halliburton, which took over the 77-year-old Magcobar mine just north of Magnet Cove as a part of a corporate acquisition in the 1990s, has petitioned to temporarily change the water-quality standards for six creeks in Hot Spring County — a change that officials say reflects only the current pollution in those creeks and not the expectation of any new pollution to be added during the cleanup.
The mine site has a 90-acre, 480-foot-deep pit that has filled with water since the mine’s closure. The pit holds about 3.7 billion gallons. The water is acidic because it flows into the pit after running off pyrite-rich spoil piles, a process called acid rock drainage.
The water in the pit has overflowed into nearby Cove Creek, which drains into the Ouachita River, and into nearby Reyburn Creek, which flows into Francois Creek and then the Saline River.
In August, Halliburton restarted the wastewater-treatment plant at the mine site to address some of the water flowing out of it.
The cleanup will help maintain water quality in the Ouachita River, Arkansas Health Department Engineering Director Jeff Stone wrote in a comment for the department submitted in September. The Ouachita River is downstream of the pollution and is the drinking water source for four public water systems serving 65,000 people.
The department requested that secondary drinking water standards — which concern the aesthetic quality of the water and not the health of the water — be applied in the Ouachita tributary Cove Creek, where back mixing is possible. Back mixing refers to the mixing of certain chemicals. The department also asked that discharge from the mine site be at a lower flow and continuous, rather than higher flow and periodic, to prevent water pipe corrosion from too-high chloride concentrations.
Karen Kesler, water quality standards coordinator with the EPA Region 6 office, listed 50 requests for additional data or questions the agency wanted answered on the project. The agency noted uncertainty about whether monitoring or “fail safes” would be in place to determine toxicity levels or whether new standards are being met.
In a letter submitted last month, Kesler noted that some of the criteria limits proposed for mineral levels in certain bodies of water are greater than the maximum levels observed during the past 12 years of monitoring. The agency recommended adjusting those levels lower or only keeping them high during “the construction period and then reduced to a lower value after the regrading/ revegetating is complete.”
The EPA would also like regular reviews conducted of the effectiveness of the work being done, along with a “a commitment to reassessing options available for minerals treatment at scheduled times during the remediation process.”
State reworks plan
to shutter landfill
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality is redesigning the project to close a north Arkansas landfill, and the Arkansas Building Authority will then reopen the bid process for contractors after bids received in September were not “viable,” department spokesman Kelly Robinson said.
Exactly what the department considers viable was unknown Friday.
Five companies submitted bids to the Building Authority by the September deadline to close the North Arkansas Board of Regional Sanitation landfill in Mountain Home, but only one properly listed a licensed engineering contractor, according to the Building Authority bid tabulation. That bid, from Bossier City, La.-based Pickett Industries, came in at $15.3 million. Bids ranged from $13.9 million to $17.5 million.
The funds will come from the state’s landfill post-closure trust fund, which is financed through fees attached to waste deposited in landfills and is designed to pay for the closure of landfills in Arkansas.
The landfill post-closure trust fund has about $17.4 million in it and was opened up for scrap tire dump cleanup through a state law passed in 2015 to allow for the cleanup — estimated to cost $1 million — of 1 million scrap tires next door to the NABORS landfill in Mountain Home.
The landfill is owned by the Ozark Mountain Solid Waste District, and the tire site is owned by a district contractor that could not finance the disposal of the tires. Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh has said she intends to ask the district for cost recovery for the projects.
Agency chief made officer at nonprofit
Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh has been elected secretary-treasurer of the nonprofit Environmental Council of States, according to a news release from the department.
The council is a nonpartisan association of environmental leaders from all 50 U.S. states and two territories.
Earlier this year, the group signed a memorandum of agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials to share more information and further protect public health, according to the EPA.