"The Crop Is Dying As We Watch It": ND Farmers Trying To Cope With Fracking Waste, Toxic Dumping [View all]

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On Daryl’s land, also on the Wayne field, a few recent spills have left splotches of infertile land where he can still see the crystalized salt flecks on the soil surface. This year Daryl planted soybeans on areas of land where the wastewater was cleaned up and the land was remediated. But still, in some areas, nothing will grow. “There’s three feet of new dirt here, but the salt is working its way into the field through the capillaries,” he said. “The crop is dying as we watch it.”

On the Wiley oil field, which sits about three miles south of the Wayne field, wastewater contamination has caused not only crop failure, Larry said, but also the death of ash and cottonwood trees. “The cattle won’t even eat the grass here,” he said. On the Renville field, Christine Peterson pointed out where she discovered a spill in the winter of 2010 because the snow was streaked yellow. Nearby, the land around a 2011 wastewater spill at a disposal site operated by the company PetroHarvester still has a running generator pumping the contaminated water out of the field. As is the case with many incidents, the quantity of wastewater released in this spill is contested. The Oil and Gas Division’s follow-up report cites 300 barrels, but local residents say the state health department initially estimated the spill to have been closer to 50,000 barrels. Either way, it’s been an expensive cleanup; the Oil and Gas Division’s report estimated it would ultimately cost $2.5 million.

Mike Artz’s land is still showing high levels of contamination, despite an ongoing cleanup and remediation effort by Murex, the well operator responsible for the spill. But even more troubling to the Artz family and their neighbors is the perception that the process has been riddled with misreporting and a lack of regulatory enforcement by state agencies. The Oil and Gas Division’s reports say that the spillage lasted for only 24 hours and, impossibly, that it amounted to exactly zero barrels of liquid. (At a recent meeting, Helms, who worked for Texaco and Hess Corp. before becoming the head of the state’s oil regulatory agency, defended the division’s reporting, explaining that farmers shouldn’t expect “complete accuracy” in an initial spill report.) Artz and his neighbors had to file a Freedom of Information request just to get a record of the health department’s estimate that 16,800 to 25,200 gallons of wastewater had spilled.

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A third problem is tanker rollovers, which occur when a driver’s wheels catch the often icy edges of North Dakota’s narrow highways and flip over. “There are more wrecks and fatalities than I’ve ever seen,” said the owner of a small trucking company in Williston who previously worked as a driver for the oil industry in Alaska and Texas and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “In the winter there are two or three every day.” But not all of the tanker spills are accidental. Jerry Samuelson explained that some truck drivers illegally dump wastewater alongside the highway to avoid having to haul it all the way to the disposal sites. A huge fine levied against a driver in the city of Minot has helped curtailed the practice, he said. But it hasn’t stopped completely; as Samuelson spoke, his fellow emergency manager Karolin Rockvoy was out investigating a report of an illegal dump. “You can tell someone’s doing some illegal dumping,” she said when she returned a few hours later with photographs. “The thing is to catch them in the act, because otherwise they keep doing it.”

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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/6/north-dakota-wastewaterlegacy.html