Ex-employee: DEP ignores own ash rules

A Schuylkill County hydrogeologist said a state agency for which he used to work ignores its own policies when permitting strip mines to be filled with coal ash.

Robert Gadinski cited four examples over seven years that he said show a pattern of the Department of Environmental Protection veering from policies designed to protect public health.

The DEP has permitted the use of coal ash, which contains metals such as arsenic, a carcinogen, as fill in mines for more than 20 years. Federal regulators are developing new rules for managing coal ash because a lagoon burst and triggered a massive spill in December 2008 in Kingston, Tenn., and the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 recommended more careful disposal and monitoring of the residues.

To illustrate the pattern that he perceives at DEP, Gadinski, who worked there for 18 years before becoming a consultant in 2004, starts at Bark Camp in Clearfield County. There, the agency tested a mix of coal ash and material dredged from waterways as mine fill. When issuing a general permit to allow the mixture's use statewide, however, the DEP accepted and continued to cite a 2004 report whose author wasn't a geologist, Gadinski said.

He filed a complaint against the author for practicing geology without a license and recently obtained the backing of a national environmental group in his challenge.

Pennsylvania law requires that all documents used to grant permits have the stamp of a certified geologist.

After the mixture was tested at Bark Camp, DEP allowed it to be used in Hazleton. Hazleton Creek Properties plans to put dredged material and coal ash into some of the strip mines on 277 acres where the company wants to build an amphitheater and other businesses.

Gadinski, testifying for a group that opposed the use of the fill in Hazleton, said the groundwater monitoring plan for the site was deficient, in part because some of the wells contained no water. A state administrative judge agreed with him in 2007 and ordered revisions to the monitoring plan.

"How can the DEP say dry wells protect the public?" Gadinski said Tuesday.

When Gadinski, who lives in Butler Township near Ashland, learned of a plan to put coal ash into strip mines near his home, he alerted the companies involved and DEP to a problem:

The pits on abandoned mine land called Locust Summit in Mount Carmel Township, Northumberland County, contained tunnels and bedrock fractures that could carry contaminants into a valley where Gadinski and his neighbors draw water from wells.

DEP permitted the coal ash disposal at Locust Summit in August 2008. After Gadinski learned in December 2009 that the permit was issued when he saw workers clearing trees to prepare the site for ash, he filed a challenge.

The state Environmental Hearing Board is scheduled to hear his appeal Jan. 25.

Gadinski said DEP should have notified him when the permit was issued and failed to follow two other policies. One policy requires monthly water tests for a year to understand what the water already contains before fill is placed, but DEP only required two well samples spread over six weeks before granting the permit. Also, the DEP has a policy against placing coal ash in proximity to an aquifer from which people drink.

DEP's counsel in the case, Craig Lambeth, was informed about Gadinski's claims and said he would decide with DEP spokesmen whether to issue a rebuttal. Generally, Lambeth said he is not permitted to discuss any case while it is in litigation.

In Tremont, meanwhile, Gadinski said he detected increases in alkalinity and magnesium while reviewing records of samples drawn from wells that supply water to the borough. In February 2007, he filed a complaint with DEP in which he said coal ash deposits from the Westwood cogeneration plant were adversely affecting Tremont's water.

A hydrogeologist for the DEP investigated and disagreed with Gadinski, who kept appealing even after a hydrologist and a regional director for the U.S. Office of Surface Mining sided with the state and against him. Eventually a federal judge ruled in Gadinski's favor.

"Gadinski presents a detailed and telling analysis of water quality data and geology underlying the mine pool and coal ash area, demonstrating a theoretical connection between the disposal area/Westwood mine pool and Tremont wells 2 and 4 and argues the conclusions set forth in OSM and DEP's technical reports are not based upon sound hydrogeological methodology and analyses," Administrative Judge James F. Roberts of the Interior Board of Land Appeals wrote in a decision remanding the case to OSM and DEP, which must conduct a more thorough investigation, in June 2009.

Since then, Gadinski said the DEP hasn't put together a plan to comply with the judge's order or at least hasn't granted his request to see the plan.

Likewise, the Pennsylvania Department of State hasn't acted on his complaint that the author of the Bark Camp report practiced geology without a license in April 2008.

Last month, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility asked the state auditor general's office to do a performance audit of whether the Department of State has been derelict in its duty in the matter. The Department of State told Gadinski several times that it lacks the funds to hire an expert to investigate the complaint, according to PEER's letter to the auditor general.

PEER also asked the auditor general to audit the performance of DEP for relying on the Bark Camp report.

The auditor general's office hasn't decided yet whether to investigate the complaints raised by PEER, a spokesman for the office, Ivan Anderson, said Tuesday.

Andrew Voros, author of the Bark Camp report, termed the complaint against him ridiculous.

"Did I ever claim to be a geologist? That's patently silly. Of course not," said Voros, who wrote the report when he was executive director of the New York/New Jersey Clean Ocean And Shore Trust. Voros, who has bachelor's degrees in psychology and biology, now is an adjunct research scientist at Columbia University.

The Bark Camp report said five years of water and soil testing found no volatile organics, pesticides, PCBs, dioxins or metals other than those attributable to mine drainage.

Gadinski, however, said metals were showing up in one monitoring well that researchers removed from the monitoring system.

"You're not going to find something unless you look for it," he said.

Monitoring Well 10 was northwest of the fill, the direction in which coal seams pitched and in which Gadinski thought groundwater might flow. Two sentences in the Bark Camp report that supported his view were removed when the report was updated in 2006.

Voros said nothing was removed from the report because of Gadinski's comments. Information deleted from page 45 about mine coal seams shifting to the northwest was retained on page 29 of the updated report.

Monitoring Well 10, Voros said, existed to sample water quality from an earlier experiment with municipal solid waste and dredge. The well was never among the nine monitoring points established for the project described in the report. A hill and a mine void separate Monitoring Well 10 from the area where dredged material and coal ash were mixed and used to reclaim a mined area, he said.

Other monitoring wells installed for the project detected salt when material dredged from salt water was used so Voros said those wells would have detected anything else flowing out of the fill.

Also Voros responded to PEER's news release in which the group said it was "targeting the principal report used to win state regulatory approval by minimizing concerns about using coal ash as mine fill."

The innovation at Bark Camp was the use of dredged material, not coal ash, which had been approved as mine fill in Pennsylvania for years before the project began at Bark Camp, Voros said.

By 2002, two years before the report came out, 58 million tons of coal ash already had been placed in mines around the state, Voros said.

While he wrote the report, he said DEP workers, not anyone for his organization, oversaw the work at Bark Camp. DEP geologists, for example, selected the location and designed the monitoring wells, he said.

"Everything that happened happened under DEP analysis and permits. When we went in, we were greeted with skepticism and in some cases outright hostility. DEP spent two years evaluating what exactly were we were talking about. Scientists, geologists, engineers were involved in the process," Voros said.

While PEER said Pennsylvania is "pouring these wastes down abandoned mines despite severe water pollution, toxic vapor and even fire dangers," Voros said he opposes indiscriminate use of coal ash.

"The landfill breach in Tennessee in 2008 -- that is a dangerous way to store coal ash and that is why we have to start properly characterizing coal ash and processing it ...," Voros said.

kjackson@standardspeaker.com

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