The Amoco (Cleanup) Process

by Steff Kessler

The immensity of BP-Amoco’s refinery pollution is mind-boggling. It’s hard enough to imagine a plume of underground pollution three times bigger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Casper’s groundwater, let alone the phenomenal array of possible chemicals and carcinogens in that toxic soup.

Consider this list of contaminants discovered so far, without full site investigation and testing: hazardous separator sludge, chromium, lead, barium, mercury, selenium, Arsenic, iron sulfate, fururals, spent lime solids, hypochlorite material, phosphate, filming amines, microbicides, leaded tank bottoms, 1& 2-methylnaphthalene, 1,4 dioxin, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, naphthalene, chloroform, silica, aluminum, metallic cobalt, molybdenum, chloroethane, boiler blown-down, spent sulfuric acid, lube separator slop, chromate-impacted soils, anthracite sand coal filters, asbestos, methane.... The list goes on and on. And that’s just the refinery property. The Amoco Pipeline Tank Farm, Soda Lake (the refinery waste pond used for decades), the North Platte River ecosystem and numerous contaminated "off-site areas" of neighboring properties are all part of the cleanup project.

Although the refinery closed in 1991, it wasn’t until a civil lawsuit was filed against Amoco by private parties in 1997 that cleanup action began. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered the company to erect a barrier wall around the entire site to stop off-site pollution releases. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) intervened in the case, and in January 1998 U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Brimmer issued an injunction against Amoco which affirmed EPA’s order for wall construction, noting that Amoco showed a "pervasive corporate attitude of delay, deter and deceive."

The DEQ took over regulation of Amoco’s cleanup last fall, signing a court-ordered consent degree with Amoco and the EPA. Although hailed by many at the time (not by us!) as an innovative approach to community participation in a hazardous waste cleanup, time has proven otherwise.

A Sham of a Public Process
The consent decree lays out a "collaborative process" by which Amoco and representatives of the city of Casper, Natrona County and DEQ decide on cleanup procedures. But remember the city’s and county’s $60 million deal with Amoco?  The deal created the Amoco Reuse Joint Powers Board, assigned to "assist in gaining judicial, public and agency support for the reuse and Conceptual Corrective Action Plan" (Amoco’s wish list for minimal cleanup). Amoco provided $1 million to the Board to hire the company’s own environmental consultants.

Thus, the intended "collaboration" has turned out to be a heavy-handed domination of the process by Amoco and its army of consultants, with the city and county (already committed to Amoco’s plan) and their consultants lined up against one or two DEQ employees. Although the consent decree probably envisioned that these city/county officials would represent the public’s best interests, the reality is that these officials have already been bought off by Amoco — literally.

So what about the public’s opportunity to participate in the process? Citizens are allowed to sit and listen to day-long, highly technical discussions (which only occur during working hours) and are usually allotted two short comment periods.
WOC has found that the public involvement process is simply not working. Most interested citizens can not take three or four days away from work each month to sit for hours through technical presentations and then try to offer detailed, substantive remarks in the short time allotted for public comments.

Many early meeting attendees have now drifted away from the process. Those citizens who continue to participate feel increasingly frustrated, forced to watch the Joint Powers Board support Amoco’s line, with only a token opportunity to participate in the discussions. And, to add further insult, it turns out that Amoco is paying one of its consultants to appear at these meetings and pose as an interested citizen, offering comments that (surprise!) consistently support Amoco’s positions.

Amoco Continues its Delay
Judge Brimmer’s decision states that the court "fault[s] Amoco for its flagrant disavowal of the risk posed by the contamination and its continued delay in taking any substantive institutional initiative to clean up its mess."

This characterization aptly describes the collaborative process (CP) as well, particularly the debate over construction of the barrier wall around the refinery site. Although ordered by EPA in 1997 and affirmed by Judge Brimmer in early 1998, Amoco managed to weaken this requirement in the consent decree to require only a wall "along the river north of the operations area, plus along the river in Area A & B, plus along the eastern boundary of the former refinery." Then at the first CP meeting, Amoco announced that it proposed to build the wall only halfway along the river front, and only halfway down the east boundary of the refinery.

Since then, we’ve watched DEQ and Amoco wrangle over the placement of the barrier wall for eight months, burying themselves in technical debates, with no definitive resolution in sight. And the barrier wall was only a minor detail of the consent decree, simply listed in the back of the document as an "existing remedial requirement." WOC feels that despite DEQ’s best efforts at times to do the right thing with this cleanup, the agency is being out-gunned by the Amoco & Joint Powers Board teams of consultants and experts ready to challenge the understaffed DEQ.

Enhancing Public Participation
WOC strongly believes that if the Amoco process is to be salvaged, public participation must be substantially enhanced. The state must make the major policy-decision points of the cleanup process clearer and more accessible to citizens who want to be involved. It needs to provide better tools to citizens so that they can participate in a meaningful way. Educational or workshop sessions could be scheduled in the evening after work so that interested citizens can attend, learn about their choices and offer informed comments for the record.

For example, how you look for pollutants, what variety of chemicals you look for, and the spacing between test sites can significantly affect the adequacy and reliability of your investigation (and the cleanup option chosen) for these properties. Background information needs to be presented in lay person’s terms, since it is difficult for the public to grasp the seriousness of contamination without knowledge of the known health risks of different on-site pollutants. In addition, once data has been gathered, it would be useful for the public to have DEQ interpret the results in non-technical language that citizens can understand. And the public needs to know what its options are for cleanup standards, apart from the risk-analysis approach that Amoco is pushing.

WOC has repeatedly asked the DEQ for citizen workshops on these topics. We will continue to press for such public-involvement tools or try to provide them ourselves through the Wyoming Pollution and Public Health Forum.

What You Can Do (Click Here)