The South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources hasn’t added any new information to its dossier on the TransCanada Keystone pipeline spill since November 30, when DENR groundwater quality team leader Brian Walsh e-mailed DENR Secretary Steve Pirner and spill team leader Kim McIntosh TransCanada’s environmental manager Bob Baumgartner is coming to Pierre today with an update on the oil clean-up southeast of Amherst. Walsh also noted that TransCanada will haul contaminated soil to a Clean Harbors landfill in Sawyer, North Dakota.
Walsh and DENR may be getting all of their information secondhand. Senator Jason Frerichs visited the site last week and didn’t see anyone from DENR:
There was only one South Dakota state official that was on site, and he only comes every day but… doesn’t stay there the whole time, and he’s with Emergency Management. There was nobody from our Department of Environment of Natural Resources, and that really bothers me, and I sent an e-mail this morning to Secretary Steve Pirner asking him why he doesn’t have more staff on site, because if this were any other type of catastrophe out there, where we know that there is these large amounts of oil that spilled on the ground, we know that DENR would be there, so why should it be any different for somebody like a TransCanada and the Keystone pipeline? [Sen. Jason Frerichs, audio transcribed from “Frerichs Notes Lack of State Officials at Oil Spill Site,” Hub City Radio, 2017.12.05].
Senator Frerichs says the Amherst spill reinforces the case for collecting taxes from TransCanada to support a spill cleanup fund. Never mind clean-up: if Frerichs is right, we don’t have the money to pay a DENR staffer to watch the clean-up.
Why no DENR staffer on site full time? Willful ignorance. Plausible denial.
That’s because the people who “watch” the clean-up are, for the most part, local responders. In my 12 years of Emergency Management, I responded to literally hundreds of hazardous materials (HAZMAT) spills ranging from paint cans being spilled to airplane and helicopter crashes. I even have an oil pipeline rupture response under my belt. I guarantee you Senator Frerichs didn’t spend more than a few minutes on-site. Politicians, regardless of party affiliation, only spend a few minutes at spill sites of large incidents, usually for a press conference or some other type of photo op. It’s not surprising there were no State personnel on-site during the timing of his very brief visit. When I was an Emergency Manager, very rarely did someone from my State’s equivalent to South Dakota’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources spend much time on the site of a HAZMAT spill. Emergency Management employs a “bottom-up” approach, meaning the “boots on the ground” folks will be mostly be filled by local emergency responders. One of my many duties as an Emergency Manager was to coordinate local resources to respond to and mitigate HAZMAT incidents. I would notify the State of the incident and I would continue coordinating everything from then on, until the site was mitigated. Once a company (trucking, pipeline, etc) realizes a spill has occurred, either by being notified by local authorities or by having a system in place telling them a spill has occurred and they notify local authorities, the company is responsible for contacting a HAZMAT cleanup company. Most have cleanup companies on speed dial. If they didn’t, I carried a list of different companies who performed different types of cleanups with me and I’d make a recommendation to them and then they’d call them. Depending on the size of the incident, the State may or may not send out a representative. If it was a small-scale incident, such as a semi involved in a crash resulting in a fuel tank leak, they would just take my report over the phone. With a large-scale incident such as a pipeline leak, a representative will respond, but only in a support role. They don’t take over command of the incident itself and they don’t spend 24/7 on-site. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t available at a moment’s notice if I did need them for something. Example: Local entities don’t usually have the authority to fine a company if they aren’t cleaning up a HAZMAT spill correctly. The State environmental agency does. If I felt the person or company responsible for the spill wasn’t doing things by the book, I’d call the State and they would send a representative who would inform them of the penalties they would receive if things weren’t done correctly. They also come on-site periodically to see how the cleanup processes is moving along, but they’re not there the entire time.
David B, I sure hope you were well remunerated for being the whipping boy if things went wrong.
There is no earthly reason the state can’t have some executive on site, especially when dealing with a bunch of fibbers like Trash Can. You can just about count on corner cutters cutting corners to save a buck here and there.
How can anyone believe these people when these spills occur 40 years sooner than the state was told?
Mike from Iowa, you must not know many government employees… The pay sucks!!! LOL
Regardless of community size or the nature of the disaster, local government leaders are responsible for overseeing all four phases of emergency management—preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. The role of federal and state government agencies are to play a supporting role in the immediate aftermath of an incident and provide funding and guidance for long-term recovery and mitigation. So why would a state executive need to be on-site for the entire incident? What are they going to do that would change the outcome of the incident?
If I remember right, the last Trash Can spill in South Dakota, Trash Can cordoned off the area, established a perimeter from which to prevent news reporters, declared a no fly zone, used local law enforcement to keep citizens and the press out and lied about the amount of spilled oil, lied about the rate at which it leaked and probably cursed the Easter Bunny.With all that, why wouldn’t the state have someone on-site?
Ever drive by a construction site and see a state employee sitting in a pickup apparently doing nothing? His purpose in life is to stay on site to ensure that the contractors don’t slip an extra truckload of something in or leave something out. It cost a lot of money to haul truckloads of contaminated soil to ND. If no one is watching who’s to say that we can’t just cover this one up in the bottom of the trench and no one will know?
I trust my mother but I still make her cut the cards…
Mr. mike, you are from Iowa and I am from South Dakota, but we do have something in common besides our heftiness and girth. We both hate and mistrust the governments of the states, so why on earth would we want them to be there overseeing such a thing? We want our local governments in charge, for here in South Dakota we believe that the government that is closest to the people is the most responsive to the people’s needs.
Why should Senator Frerichs need to spend any more than a few minutes to see there was no one there. He says he contacted the powers to be and they confirmed that this place is not being monitored like need be. You claim that you had a ruptured oil line that you worked on. Where was that and how did you dispose of it? How many men were on site to make sure that the contamination was cleared out and the area made whole? How big of a spill was it?
How many truck loads of containment have been shipped to North Dakota? Who is keeping track of that?
It is good it is being trucked to North Dakota. They know how to dispose of contaminated soil after all that garbage they had to truck out from Cannonball. Better there than being hauled down to Igloo, eh?
How do you know that it has been trucked Mr. grudznick? These oil guys are just confidence men with no character. That is how they got the job. Let’s see the bills of lading that have crossed the state line into the dump in North Dakota published with tonnage receipts. Mr. David B claims he has experience in all of this so he can tell us how deep the cuts were made and how much soil would be replaced for a 15,000 gallon oil spill. Would the soil that is replaced by put down as a clay mixture first and then the good rich top soil that was there or will it just be fill dirt from some other refuse pile, how will it all work?
Ah, now I understand, Mr. jerry, and I agree wity you. I, too, think it would be good to have some receipts and proof they are not simply pounding it down a nearby borehole or dumping it in the creek. We don’t want to pay people to haul dirt to North Dakota if they’re not really taking the dirt to North Dakota. There should be inspection papers and such from the borders showing them going north heavy and coming back light.