“We noticed in 2015, 2016, 2017 that the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill constituents were starting to indicate that they were accepting fracking waste,” Belle Vernon Sewage Waste Authority Superintendent Guy Kruppa told Public Herald in this extensive interview.

LISTEN TO GUY’S FULL INTERVIEW



“The indicators were things as sodium, calcium, chloride, barium, high conductivity, TDS — so those were what we were looking for. It wasn’t until we were hot on the trail that it was confirmed by a subcontractor at the landfill that they were taking fracking waste: things laced in diesel fuel, cake, things used in flowback and things used in drill cuttings.

“We contacted the DEP and told them that we think they are taking frack waste.

“And I told them this thinking I was going to tell them something they didn’t know. And the DEP guy said, ‘yeah, we know.’

“I said ‘you know the landfill is taking frack waste?’ And DEP said, ‘yeah, they’re only allowed to take so much.’ I said do you know how much they’re taking? And DEP said, ‘yeah, they record it on our system.’

“I said do you know they’re taking it at night and on weekends when the landfill is closed. And DEP said, ‘well they’re not allowed.’

“And I said, ‘It might not be allowed, but they’re doing it.’ And DEP said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you.’ And I said, ‘I know what to tell you, they’re taking it!’

“DEP said, ‘it’s on an honesty policy and they’re supposed to report it.’ I told them they’re taking it under the cloak of darkness, long before the landfill opens.

“Those constituents that are in that leachate aren’t in municipal sewage. We had to have special tests done by our lab to figure it out. Then we started to find out more about frack waste, and we said we needed to test for radiologicals. So we got West Virginia University to do an independent study on the effluent of the leachate and our effluent at the sewage plant.

“The thing about Pennsylvania is there’s really no limit to what we can discharge because let’s face it, that stuff shouldn’t be in there. Sewage plants aren’t usually regulated for something like that.

“But, we have to follow drinking water standards which is 5pCi/L for radium and we found out through the independent study we were discharging 8pCi/L. So, we had to notify users such as the Charleroi Drinking Water Authority a mile downstream.

“When I told this to the DEP inspector he said, ‘Well what side of the river are they on?’ And I said, ‘They’re on the opposite side about a mile.’ So he says to me, ‘Oh, well they’re good, they’re on the other side.’

“The funny thing is a guy from Charleroi drinking water calls me up three days after we turned off the pipe. He says, ‘Did you get the landfill shut off?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Why, did you hear?’ He says, ‘No. We haven’t run our caustic pumps in ten years, and we had to turn them on.

“To me, that’s scary. Their PH was down, but for the last ten years it’s never been down. So, is that all coincidental…does our water not reach the other side of the river?

“With the DEP, if they don’t test for it, it doesn’t exist. It’s not there.

“You might as well say this stuff is hazardous waste. It was industrial waste.

“We were the landfill’s permit to pollute. We weren’t required to analyze for these [fracking contaminants] so it was passed right through the plant to the Monongahela River.

“These animals that are in these tanks breathe air, so if you feed them a steady dose of salt, which was high in chloride, they’re not going to survive. So the landfill leachate was killing off our bugs, therefore we weren’t able to treat sewage very effectively.

“And I was reporting these violations that we had to the DEP. So they were well aware that we weren’t making our limits.

“So the major danger was we were passing these things through to the source water.

“At first the landfill was very cooperative and said they would do all they could to solve the problems. And they did nothing.

“They had some smart PR spokesperson who came out and said they never had any violations. Well that’s true, they don’t, because they don’t have those limits.

“They don’t have [our] NPDES permit. We do. So they can discharge pretty much anything they wanted and they weren’t going to violate anything.

“The DEP is so compartmentalized that we answer to Clean Water and the landfill answers to Solid Waste. We were telling our problems to Clean Water, but they weren’t relaying our problems to Solid Waste. For Solid Waste, you might as well say they are a waste, because they were not conveying our problems to Clean Water.

“You have a giant loophole in the DEP. You have Waste Management on one side and you have Clean Water on the other. And running right through the middle is pretty much their leachate. It’s unregulated and no pretreatment was required.

“But the DEP didn’t go to them and say they had to do something about it.

“I have lost a lot of respect for that institution [for the DEP]. We rely on this state agency to protect our source water, to protect our resources, to protect our environment. And this is their solution?

“It’s a complex situation. You rely on the DEP to help you, and they didn’t give us much help at all. We had to do it all on our own, which is pretty sad.”