(The following story by Jennifer McKee appeared on the Missoulian website on August 13.)
HELENA, Mont. — Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s aggressive take on getting Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway to clean up a decades-old underground pond of pollution in Livingston seems to be paying off.
Almost a year and a half after Schweitzer told the railroad that Montana intended to clean up the contaminants and bill the company for the work, BNSF has drilled dozens more wells to find out where the pollution is and built a special plant to clean up both air and water fouled by decades of rail work.
“It’s sort of put an end to the investigation and got stuff moving,” said Aimee Reynolds, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality manager overseeing the cleanup.
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But railroad spokesman Gus Melonas said the company always intended to clean up the pollution. He said the company couldn’t start working on the project earlier because it was waiting for the state to sign off on the cleanup plans.
The waiting occurred mostly before Schweitzer became governor in 2005.
“As we have indicated before, BNSF submitted plans and were waiting for state approval for extended periods of time,” Melonas said. “We’re pleased that we’re progressing on this project. This environmental project is extremely important to BNSF.”
Melonas said BNSF has long wanted to clean up the site and pointed to the $10 million the company spent at the site before Schweitzer sent his letter. The $10 million was spent before the majority of the work began. Melonas said current figures were not available.
BNSF had a large rail yard in Livingston for decades, ending in the 1980s. Back then, the diesel fuel that powers engines was cheap and engineers often spilled it. Reynolds estimates better than a million gallons of fuel were spilled over the years and is now contaminating water underground.
Additionally, it was common then for companies to bathe engines and other parts in degreasing solvents to clean them, Reynolds said. All of those chemicals ended up on the ground, as there were no rules against it.
Over time, the solvents and fuel sunk into the soil and contaminated groundwater and air just below the surface. The result was an underground polluted pond that has since been named a state Superfund site – a top environmental cleanup priority.
But little was ever done to clean up the site, said Jim Barrett, executive director of the Park County Environmental Council, a Livingston group formed in 1990 to, among other things, birddog the cleanup of the BNSF pollution.
Instead, the state and the company engaged in years of bureaucratic positioning that resulted in lots of paperwork, but little in the way of on-the-ground work.
“It was like a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “The company was very skilled at working the system and knowing where the weaknesses were in enforcement. They were able to play that to a maximum to delay spending money to do the work they had to do.”
In March 2006, Schweitzer called a news conference to announce he was “done lawyering” with BNSF and intended to clean up the pollution and bill the railroad for the work.
Within weeks, Reynolds said, the company had agreed to the state’s plans for cleaning up the site. In the last year and half, she said, much has happened at the Livingston rail yard, which is now home to Montana Rail Link.
In addition to drilling wells, the company has built a plant to clean the dirtied air and underground water. It is set to begin working in October.
The cleaned air will be released into the environment. Petroleum removed from the plume will be sold to a Great Falls company that sells recovered petroleum for industrial fuel. The water will be released in the nearby Yellowstone River, after it meets all state water standards.
After removing as much pollution as possible, the state plans to continue working in the soil to encourage bacteria to eat the rest of the pollution. Not all the pollution can be removed, but Reynolds said enough of the contaminants can be cleaned that the stuff left behind won’t hurt anybody.
“What I hope is, in the next five years, to have all the remediation actions done or in place,” she said.
Reynolds said BNSF has been good to work with.
Schweitzer said he was tired of the company’s delays – and was worried that the underground contamination would soon hit the Yellowstone River.
“There’s a few times in a person’s life when you’ve got to say, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” he said. “I knew that what was happening wasn’t working. They have more lawyers than engineers. Maybe they ought to lay off some of the lawyers and hire some engineers and get this done.”
Barrett said BNSF’s change since Schweitzer got aggressive with the cleanup has been “impressive.”
“It stimulated a level of activity that we have not seen, ever,” he said.