(The Associated Press circulated the following article on September 10.)
HAUSER, Idaho — More problems have been found at the BNSF Railway’s refueling depot where several leaks were discovered earlier this year.
A supposedly impermeable concrete coating at the depot has blistered, officials said.
There is no evidence of any train fuel leaking through the coating and into the aquifer that sits below the depot, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality said.
Though railway officials say the blisters are minor and pose no threat — and state officials have cautiously agreed — opponents say the finding is just another reason to have the depot moved.
Public tolerance for any more problems at the depot is running low, said Barry Rosenberg, executive director of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance. The blistered coating was discovered two weeks ago, but the news is just surfacing, Rosenberg said Friday.
“The public is very worried they’re not going to find out what’s happening at the depot and this will just make them more suspicious,” he said.
BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas said there was no impact on the Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, the source of drinking water for 400,000 people in northern Idaho and Washington.
“This is not a leak. There is no impact on the aquifer,” Melonas said Friday. “It’s cosmetic. The matter is being corrected.”
The $42 million depot, which allows locomotives to be refueled in minutes rather than hours, opened Sept. 1 last year and began leaking diesel fuel into the aquifer almost immediately. An investigation found that fuel was seeping into the ground through cracks on the concrete refueling platform, through faulty seals in a plastic liner buried under the depot that was intended to contain any leaks and from a crushed plastic pipe that was carrying oil-tainted waste water.
Idaho health officials believe as much as 3,000 gallons of diesel and motor oil have leaked into the aquifer, although they believe the levels of pollutants in the groundwater are not currently harmful to human health.
The depot was temporarily closed under an emergency court order, but reopened in May after the railroad spent $10 million on repairs. The railroad has blamed the problems on faulty design and sloppy construction, and is suing the design firm and the Spokane-based general contractor, Lydig Construction.
Repairs on the blisters are already being made. Soil tests were conducted below the locations of the blisters and there were no elevated levels of petroleum found, said Marc Kalbaugh of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
“There’s not a whole lot of alarm bells going off here,” Kalbaugh said. “This is not a situation where we have a breach in containment or they’re contaminating the aquifer. This is an isolated incident.”
News of the blisters was included in a progress report to Kootenai County Commissioners by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.
Post Falls Mayor Clay Larkin said the state and the railroad need to be forthcoming about any problems at the depot, no matter how small.
“There needs to be a system in place where the public is notified by BNSF or the DEQ as soon as problems arise,” Larkin said in a statement. “One of our greatest fears is that there will be a cover-up — this incident reinforces our concern.”