Final spot for oil-spill debris:
common landfills
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lclark@MiamiHerald.com
MOUNT VERNON, Ala. -- At a sprawling landfill some 50 miles from the oil-spotted coastline, trash bags brimming with tar balls, oil-soaked boom, sand and tangles of seagrass are dumped.
Though workers in the largest environmental disaster in the U.S. wear protective gloves and coveralls as they labor across the Gulf Coast clearing beaches of oil, the mounds of debris they amass meet a pedestrian fate: burial in the same landfills that take in diapers, coffee grounds, burnt toast, yogurt containers, grass clippings and demolition debris.
Since the first trucks began rolling in June, nearly 40,000 tons of ``oily solids'' and related debris have been sent to municipal landfills from Louisiana to Florida, sparking enough consternation that BP agreed late last week to stop dumping in one Mississippi landfill.
``They tell us, `It's not bad, it's not hazardous,' '' said Christopher Malloy, who borrowed a sign from his wife's tanning salon to announce his opposition to using the Pecan Grove landfill in Mississippi's Harrison County.
``Oil in Gulf -- Bad. Oil in landfill/wellwater not bad? What!'' reads the sign in his front yard, less than half a mile from the landfill where 1,300 tons had been disposed as of July 20.
``What I worry about is when they come back and say, `Oops, we were wrong. So sorry,' '' said Malloy, 39, a registered nurse who said he fears that toxic chemicals from the oil soaked material could seep into his groundwater drinking supply. ``Where does that leave us?''
Under a 34-page waste management plan developed by the federal government, oily solid waste that reaches Gulf Coast beaches is bagged by BP contractors and transferred to area landfills by waste management giants: Heritage Environmental Services in Louisiana; Waste Management Inc., which is working from the Louisiana-Mississipi border east to the Ecofina River, southeast of Tallahassee; and Republic Services, which covers Florida's west coast, the Keys and Miami.
Oily water is handled differently: mostly it's processed for recovery.
So far, BP says it has recovered about 836,000 barrels of oily water from the Gulf, picked up by skimming vessels or vacuumed up as ``oily mousse'' at the shore.
WHERE IT GOES
The oily water is taken to facilities -- including a vacant shipyard near the Alabama landfill -- where the oil is separated from the water and sent to refineries for processing as fuel. BP's website says it gets about one gallon of oil from each 17 gallons of seawater. BP has said it will donate the net revenue from recovered oil to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
The ``oily sheen'' often seen floating on the Gulf is too thin to use for fuel; the water is removed and the oil is mixed with ash and turned into a solid that goes to landfills.
The ``floating hotels'' -- the armada of skimmers and spotter boats, as well as the relief wells operating in the Gulf -- are also producing liquid waste, and Waste Management runs ``basically a milk route'' to the offshore vessels, collecting wastewater and rainwater and delivering it to onshore wastewater treatment plants.
Some material is too valuable for disposal: damaged containment boom -- in great demand because of the spill -- is washed and repaired at a cavernous building in Theodore. Patriot Environmental Services has processed more than 40 miles of boom.
The EPA and each state's environmental protection agency have signed off on the plans for the oil-smeared bulky waste. And the operators of the landfills insist the BP garbage is not unprecedented and is suitable for the type of landfills they've selected: disposal sites that take household waste, as well as ``special waste'' like contaminated soil. They note much of the waste is generated by the cleanup operation itself: soiled cleanup coveralls, gloves, sandwich wrappers and drink containers. Some 44 tons of waste materials have been recycled.
``This waste is not that much different from what we've been accepting here every day,'' said Matt East, a district manager with Waste Management, which runs the Pecan Grove site and Mt. Vernon landfill in Chastang. The BP waste at Chastang averages about 20 tons a day, which sounds staggering, East notes, until you realize it accounts for just 2 percent of the landfill's daily intake ``The volume is minuscule. It really is.''
Waste Management estimates that the BP waste at the Pecan Grove accounts for 6 percent of the landfill's waste per day. The landfill, according to the state, accepts about 8,000 tons of trash a week.
What worries environmentalists and some residents is that under EPA rules, waste from petroleum operations is exempt from hazardous-waste rules. But cleanup officials say they're taking the precautionary measure of testing the BP waste shoreside for potential carcinogenic volatile substances including benzene, toluene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals like nickel.
BP is required to sample and test collected waste weekly and the EPA is doing its own sampling to confirm, said EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara. It has yet to turn up a hazardous sample, she said.
A SEA CHANGE
Though what was spewing out of the blown-out well in the Gulf was toxic, scientists say the light sweet crude undergoes a sea change as it bobs in the water for 50 miles or more before hitting shore.
``At least 50 percent of the oil evaporates in the first week,'' said Ed Overton, an oil-chemical hazard assessment expert at Louisiana State University. ``And it's the most volatile parts of the oil, the potentially carcinogenic benzenes and so on.''
The weathered oil also gets chewed on by naturally occurring bacteria that eat the oil.
``By the time it gets to shore, it's more like road tar,'' Overton said. ``The average driver is exposed to more oil volatiles filling his gas tank than being around oily waste.''
The sites in use now are regular municipal landfills, not designed for hazardous waste. Waste Management officials, who offered a tour of the Chastang site last week, said its three landfills boast important safety features including a ring of ground-water monitoring wells that are tested twice a year, and pipes that collect rainfall and the ``garbage juice'' that percolates through the waste. That sludge is then taken to a sewage treatment plant for disposal.
The Coast Guard and the EPA in late June tightened their oversight of the project and imposed more requirements on BP, including developing a community outreach plan. The changes came after an Associated Press review found collection problems, including a leaky truck piled with protective gear that ``left a pollution trail of its own.''
Waste Management says its trucks carrying the waste are lined with plastic to prevent waste from leaking and its landfills are lined with high-density polyetheylene membranes rated to last 1,000 years, atop an impermeable clay layer.
POLLUTION DEBATE
G. Fred Lee, an environmental consultant in El Macero, Calif., who has written several studies criticizing landfills, says such thousand-year claims are written by consultants working for the landfill companies, and are ``way out of line.''
But he believes that the oily waste going into Gulf Coast landfills is too degraded to pose danger.
``What's going into these landfills is not likely to cause groundwater pollution,'' he said.
Still, suspicion persists, particularly in Harrison County, Miss., which succeeded in getting a halt to disposals at the Pecan Grove site.
``BP is responsible for polluting our beaches, our marshes, our estuaries and now they're picking it up, hauling it not more than five miles away and dumping it in our landfill,'' said Marlin Ladner, a supervisor whose district includes the landfill and the nearly 300 groundwater dependent homes in a half-mile radius. ``That's a slap in the face.''
In Florida, David Guest, an environmental attorney with Earthjustice, said he has had calls from anguished residents asking about legal recourse to stop oil spill debris from reaching the Springhill Landfill near Campbellton in Jackson County. That site had accepted more than 14,000 tons -- 13 percent of its landfill intake.
``There's a genuine serious risk of poisoning the aquifer years from now,'' Guest said, arguing that once the landfills are closed they are not monitored.
Waste Management officials, however, said federal law requires that the type of landfills used for spill debris be monitored for 30 years post-closure.
The Springhill landfill takes in debris from Florida beaches, and at least one county, Escambia, is working to reduce the amount of beach sand that lands there. County officials have devised a rake that cuts down on how much sand is lifted, said Sandy Jennings, an engineer with the county's environmental agency.
``It works something like a kitty-litter scoop,'' said Jennings, noting that county officials were worried about losing sand, especially from the barrier islands. Since the development of the rake, the county now scoops up about 98 percent product and just 2 percent sand, Jennings said.
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Here's Where BP is Dumping Its Oil Spill Waste
Infographic: Hatty Lee
As the map below shows, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved nine landfills in the Gulf Coast to receive the waste products from the country's largest oil spill. Five of those nine landfills are located in communities where a majority of residents are people of color.
The sites are in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi and are regular municipal landfills, not designed for hazardous waste, according to the Miami Herald. That's because waste management officials claim the debris is not hazardous. So far, the landfills have received 40,000 tons of "oily solids" and waste from the clean up of the disaster, including soiled gloves.
The analysis of the landfill sites and racial data was done by Robert D. Bullard, a prominent figure in the environmental justice movement and director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center. Calls to the EPA were not returned.
The only place that has successfully halted dumping at their landfill is Harrison County, Mississippi, where 71 percent of residents are white.
In Florida, white residents were incredulous that their town of Spring Hill was picked for dumping oil waste --- until they realized the EPA had printed a typo. The federal agency didn't mean Spring Hill, where whites make up 94 percent of the town's residents. They meant the Springhill Regional Landfill in Campbellton, a town of just 221 people, where 60 percent of residents are African American.
The waste is being hauled around the Gulf Coast by three giants in the business of waste management: Heritage Environmental Services in Louisiana; Waste Management Inc. on the Louisiana-Mississippi border and in Florida; and Republic Services in Florida.
As Bullard pointed out in his analysis, the decision about where to dump BP oil waste is no surprise. Black and Latino communities in the South have long been "sacrifice zones."
An investigation by the Associated Press in June found that "the handling and disposal of oily materials was haphazard at best." Reporters found a truck leaking tar balls, sand and water on a main beach road and also oily sand sitting in an uncovered waste container in a state park.
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