Waste Management officials said Tuesday it was a business decision to bring waste from a Kansas oil pipeline spill to a landfill outside of Omaha, and sought to assure concerned Douglas County officials that the contaminated soil and debris don’t pose a threat to the local environment.
“It’s just economics,” Mike Hey, area disposal manager for Waste Management of Nebraska Inc., told Douglas County Board members who questioned why the waste was being disposed of in Nebraska.
Waste Management won the bid to dispose of the waste from Keystone Pipeline owner TC Energy’s cleanup of the Dec. 7 leak, which spilled nearly 600,000 gallons of tar sands oil into Mill Creek and surrounding land in rural Washington County, Kansas.
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Hey said the Pheasant Point Landfill, outside Bennington in rural Douglas County, was one of the two Waste Management landfills closest to the spill site that are qualified to take the waste. The other is near Topeka, Kansas.
Hey said he decided on the Omaha-area landfill because it is better equipped to handle such a spike in waste. Pheasant Point is a little larger than the Topeka landfill and has more workers and more heavy equipment, Hey told the board.
“It’s not uncommon to take petroleum-contaminated soils in this area,” Hey said, citing leaking gas station tanks as an example. “We have a customer who comes to us and says, ‘Hey, we have this big oil spill.’ We all saw it in the news. ... They estimate the amount of tonnage that they think they’re going to bring us or cubic yards. We present them with our options of what we have in the area.”
He declined to say how much Waste Management is being paid to dispose of the waste.
Waste Management owns and operates the landfill, but Douglas County collects fees for materials dumped there. The county is being paid $3 a ton for the Kansas oil spill waste.
Kent Holm, Douglas County environmental services manager, set the rate under authority given to him by the County Board. Holm said he does not have the authority to reject materials that the landfill is qualified to receive under federal and state regulations.
So far about 34,000 tons, or about 48,000 cubic yards, of waste from the Kansas spill has been deposited at Pheasant Point, Hey said. He currently expects that amount to double, although it’s likely to climb higher as the federal Environmental Protection Agency directs the cleanup.
For perspective, Pheasant Point Landfill typically takes in about 500,000 tons of solid waste each year.
An oil spill in eastern Ecuador has reached a protected area of the nation’s Amazon rainforest and contaminated a river that supplies water to Indigenous communities.
An outside laboratory, Pace Analytical, has analyzed multiple samples and found the waste to be non-hazardous under government regulations, according to documents that Waste Management gave the County Board on Tuesday, and to records online at the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy. Samples must be submitted for testing for every 2,000 cubic yards of contaminated debris.
County Board members had asked specifically about levels of benzene, a carcinogenic material that’s used in the Keystone Pipeline. Josh Buehre, waste approval manager for Waste Management of Nebraska, said the federal regulatory limit for benzene is 500 parts per billion. The highest amount of benzene in a sample so far, Buehre said, was 79 parts per billion in such waste as booms and absorbent materials used to contain the spread.
County Board Member Maureen Boyle said she was particularly pleased to hear the testing is being done by a third party and reassured by the Waste Management officials’ description of how the landfill is designed to contain the materials and monitor for potential leaks and their experience with this type of waste.
“I feel reassured with what they presented that the contamination risk is just minimal,” Boyle said.
County Board member Jim Cavanaugh said he had not yet been through the lengthy documents and plans to ask someone with more expertise to study them.
“They gave us information that we had requested at the meeting, which we will now analyze and follow up with whatever questions we may have to get to a final answer on the whole issue of the Keystone oil spill waste coming to Nebraska,” Cavanaugh said.
He said that he’s “not particularly interested in receiving waste” from a Kansas oil spill and that the county should revisit its provisions that allow that to happen.
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the Sidney bench jumps for joy after defeating Beatrice during a Class B state girls basketball tournament first-round game on Thursday, March 2, 2023, at Pinnacle Bank Arena.
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