Signs point to Whitefish River clean-up

Whitefish Pilot

Whitefish mayor Mike Jenson brought the subject up during the city council's June 1 meeting — the Environmental Protection Agency might make a decision on cleaning up the Whitefish River "within a month," he said, based on information from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

Other signs point the same direction. Local surveyors have been out on the Whitefish River in the past few weeks taking cross-sectional measurements of the river. Meanwhile, local contractors report hearing about requests for a dredge large enough to handle river-bottom clean-up work.

BNSF Railway spokesperson Gus Melonas, however, told the Pilot that dredging is not part of the company's remediation plans. The company's consultants are taking samples from the river, but there are no plans to use a dredge in the river, Melonas said.

A decade of sampling in the Whitefish River clearly shows diesel fuel contamination in the sediments covering the river bottom, but the exact source of the pollution has not been identified.

BNSF Railway's environmental consultants, Kennedy/Jenks, began sampling river sediment in 1998. That was the year DEQ issued a "unilateral administrative order" for implementation of a remedial investigation of the company's railyard facility in Whitefish, which is now a state Superfund site.

The next year, BNSF submitted a draft Ecological Risk Assessment Work Plan to DEQ. A final version of that plan is still being developed.

The most recent round of river investigations began after a citizen complained of seeing an oily sheen on the surface of the river at several locations. On Aug. 16, 2007, Kate Fry, at DEQ's remediation division, wrote to David Romero, at the EPA's emergency response program in Denver, Colo., informing him of the report. While DEQ is the lead agency investigating the railyard, the EPA is the lead agency for the river.

DEQ was "looking into seep of oil discovered on Whitefish River (not related to Town Pump)," Fry stated in her activity report. The oil was seen outside the Superfund site's boundary but "could possibly be historic contamination from BNSF," she said.

Fry said she "wasn't aware of specific releases' and referred to "100 years of operation" and "wastewater lagoons directly discharged to river."

Romero requested the sediment data collected by Kennedy/Jenks as well as data the consultants had collected from the railyard Superfund site. He also asked "if the city had been told if EPA involved," Fry said.

The EPA hired its own consultants to investigate the river pollution — URS Operating Services, in Denver. URS personnel traveled to Whitefish in August and October 2007, where they encountered steep riverbanks and thick vegetation and ended up using a boat and waders to collect samples.

By that time, the official name of the project had been changed from "Whitefish River Gasoline Seep" to "Whitefish River Diesel Sheen," as pollution seen in the river just upstream from the U.S. 93 culverts began to be associated with a leaking underground tank at the Town Pump gas station.

A number of possible sources for diesel contamination in the river were already known:

¥ In 1973, BNSF had installed an interceptor trench between the Whitefish River and its railyard to prevent an underground plume of diesel and Bunker C fuel from entering the river. The trench is below the BNSF Loop Trail and east of the roundhouse, downhill from BNSF's fueling facility.

¥ As many as 45 leaking underground storage tanks were documented around Whitefish, and at least 17 of them had not been resolved. These included gas-station and heating-fuel tanks.

¥ In July 1989, a BNSF freight train derailed, spilling 25,000 gallons of diesel into Mackinaw Bay, on Whitefish Lake's east shore.

Kennedy/Jenks' reported in 2000 finding two sites in the river with significant contamination — near BNSF's interceptor trench and near the Riverside Park footbridge, upstream from the Baker Avenue bridge. The first site made sense, but the source of the pollution at the second site was unidentified.

In addition, Kennedy/Jenks concluded that "heavy contaminants' were being absorbed into the sediments, lessening the chance of water contamination. The consultant also claimed underground fuel had been contained at the railyard, and "natural attenuation" between 1994 and 1999 was decreasing the concentration of the underground plumes in the railyard. The pollution was "weathering away" underground, Kennedy/Jenks claimed.

URS samples collected in 2007 were tested by the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Safety Laboratory, which specializes in analyzing samples associated with oil spills. Many of the same chemicals analyzed in the Kennedy/Jenks samples were also analyzed by URS — particularly diesel-range organics, total extractable hydrocarbons and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons, all associated with petroleum.

Samples were collected by URS at 15 locations — from the outlet of Whitefish Lake downstream to the city's sewage treatment plant. Thick sediment laying at the bottom of the river was disturbed by either walking or using a shovel, and samples were collected if an oily sheen appeared on the surface.

URS discovered unusually high contamination near the Columbia Avenue bridge, where local fire personnel had set up oil-containment booms. The Coast Guard laboratory concluded that the sample collected there contained very heavy "asphalt-like" petroleum oil.

Out of 15 locations sampled, only four had no visible sheen on the water surface after the sediment was disturbed. Diesel-range organics were found on both sides of the river, but four locations had the highest concentrations — near the interceptor trench, at Kay Beller Park, near the Columbia Avenue bridge, and 800 feet downstream from the Columbia Avenue bridge.

"The (diesel-range organics' concentrations in between these four locations decrease, which makes it difficult to link these four locations to the same source," URS reported in March 2008, but the consultants suggested several explanations:

¥ Contamination near the interceptor trench came from BNSF's fueling facility, but it was unclear if it was historic or current.

¥ River flow is not consistent at different locations, and contamination might settle in areas of low flow or be washed away in areas of high flow.

¥ The composition of the river sediments could change from one location to another, and some materials might better absorb contamination.

¥ Contamination might be migrating by groundwater or subsurface pathways.