(The following story by Michael Jamison appeared on the Missoulian website on November 27, 2009.
WHITEFISH, Mont. — Excavators have unearthed “no big surprises” in their environmental cleanup of the Whitefish River, but the work is lagging several weeks behind schedule and is now expected to last through the end of December.
“They haven’t hit any major obstacles,” said Jennifer Chergo, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “They’re just moving slower than they expected.”
The cleanup, Chergo said, was planned to be about finished by now, but workers are “only about 40 percent done. I think it will probably continue through the end of December.”
The EPA ordered Burlington Northern Santa Fe to undertake the river restoration after finding diesel fuel and other contaminants mired in the muck. The pollution, Chergo said, was presumably put there by a century of railroading, and BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas confirmed that analysis of the sediment showed the contamination dated from “many decades ago.”
A local resident called EPA in 2007 to report an oily sheen on the river surface not far from a BNSF fueling facility. That area already is a state Superfund site, with a known plume of diesel spreading beneath it on the shallow aquifer.
When the agency investigated, it found bunker fuel oil and weathered diesel trapped in sediment. The contamination begins adjacent to the railroad facility and extends downriver about two miles.
This fall’s work, Chergo said, involves cleaning a 500-foot stretch of river from the BNSF yard to the Second Street bridge on U.S. Highway 93. Crews have installed large coffer dams along the shoreline, and pumped water out from behind them. Excavators then scoop out the top foot of sediment, which is later hauled by rail to a special landfill in North Dakota.
As they work, scientists analyze core samples to determine the spread of pollution, Chergo said. The contamination seems not to be evenly distributed, but rather has been concentrated in certain spots by river currents.
So far, she said, the work appears to be proceeding as planned, if a little slowly. More work is set for next fall, and additional cleanup could be scheduled for spring if river flows allow.
Rehabilitation of the work site will take place in the spring, Melonas said.
Officials at BNSF have said they intend to remove between 1,000 and 2,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment before the project ends. Melonas said 20 rail cars already have been filled with sediment and 14 more have been ordered.
“We want to ensure that we take more, rather than less,” Melonas said. “We want to do this right.”
Melonas said this fall’s work comes at an estimated cost of between $1 million and $1.5 million.
He called the work to date “extremely successful.”
The city of Whitefish, meanwhile, has finished drilling some two dozen sampling wells, intended to assess the scope of the underground pollution plume. Residents became concerned last spring that the plume might have reached beneath neighboring properties, after BNSF approached homeowners with offers to buy them out. Several in the trendy Railroad District neighborhood agreed to sell.
Working with a state grant, city officials drilled the one-time-use sampling holes in mid-November, and now await lab results. City Attorney John Phelps said the analysis should be complete within a matter of “days or weeks. We certainly hope all the samples come back clean, but at this point that almost seems like too much to ask.”
City leaders have requested that BNSF place the neighborhood properties it purchased back on the market, as a show of confidence the land is unpolluted. The railroad has not responded to that request.
In addition to EPA and city officials, state regulators also are investigating site pollution at the Whitefish railroad facility, in anticipation of a long-term cleanup there including the underground plumes and shallower soils.