MIKE MASTERSON: On the Buffalo

Drilling to start

Harbor Environmental of Little Rock will get the state contract to drill beneath at least one of the massive waste lagoons at C&H Hog Farms.

I'm withholding any festive hooting until this latest move, supposedly to protect our Buffalo National River flowing six miles downstream from the factory, proves valid, appropriate and transparent. After all, it's the same national river and state treasure that last year, alone, attracted well over a million visitors who left behind over $62 million in tourism dollars in our relatively impoverished state.

Sorry, but I'm gun shy to offer premature kudos to the state for finally putting Arkansans and its national river ahead of special interests.

While I halfheartedly commend the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough) for hopefully deciding to finally discover what the wet material is that Oklahoma State University geologist Todd Halihan says his electrical resistivity studies discovered deep beneath one lagoon, I also recall Halihan supposedly offering to arrange for this necessary drilling for free at that time. Oh well, it's only tax dollars.

If Harbor Environmental's efforts show waste is leaking through a fracture in this specific location, the God-awful stuff likely has continued spreading since the tests in March 2015 into the cracked limestone subsurface near Big Creek (a major Buffalo tributary) at least as deep as 120 feet down.

I'll not spend more words explaining how neither the Department of Environmental Quality nor the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission supposedly were informed of Halihan's findings until this April when, through a Freedom of Information request, the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance and other coalition members intent on protecting the purity of the river revealed them during a commission meeting in Little Rock.

Such a revelation didn't place the Big Creek Research and Extension Team in the best of lights. This is the group from the University of Arkansas Agriculture Division that retained Halihan in the first place to discover if pollution is soaking from C&H into the watershed.

Naturally, commissioners and others wondered at the meeting why they hadn't been told of Halihan's suspected leak and fracture many months earlier, or whenever it was that the Big Creek team first learned of it. Team members said they didn't express concern about Halihan's findings because their other research (none directly beneath the lagoons) hadn't revealed any patterns of pollution. Hmmm. I see.

A news account the other day by Emily Walkenhorst reported that C&H, whose existence in the watershed has been fostered and encouraged by the state's sustained kindnesses, also has been granted a permit by the agency to install plastic lagoon liners to replace the clay liners the state initially approved. My mind boggles at the mere thought of trying to safely and thoroughly make such a long-after-the fact transition.

And, of course, there were more revelations to report in this national park swine saga that should never have happened.

Considering that the Department of Environmental Quality, since 2102, was clearly intent on quickly and quietly granting the permit for this factory, a favorite paragraph of Walkenhorst's story for me went like this:

"[Department Deputy Director Julie] Chapman also said Friday that the department would look further into what officials should regularly report to commissioners after Pollution Control and Ecology Commissioner Wesley Stites wondered why commissioners hadn't been given more immediate notice of a permit modification granted earlier this year to a relative of the C&H Hog Farms owners to apply manure from C&H on EC Farms property. The department issued the permit June 29 and listed it at the end of its agenda packet for Friday's commission meeting. Stites said he felt 'blindsided.'"

Welcome, Commissioner Stites, to the feelings of a vast number of taxpaying, voting Arkansans (including former Gov. Mike Beebe) who believe this whole misguided mess has been one blindside.

"'I think the last thing the department can afford to do ... is give the appearance that we're attempting to ... avoid notice,' Stites said, adding that part of what made C&H's original operational permit approval contentious was the feeling among members of the public that they were not properly notified of the permit application," the story read.

Chapman responded that she believed her department can do a better job of trying to anticipate what commissioners would be interested in. "We are open," she said. "We are trying to be transparent."

Open? Transparent? Seriously? The C&H controversy has roiled for three years with everything but openness and transparency. The commissioner was on target when he pointed out the last thing the department can afford to do is continue its opaque methods favoring this swine factory that should never have allowed into our sacred and precious watershed.

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

Editorial on 07/26/2016

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