It turned out, the salts in the leachate were hurting the bugs in Kruppa’s sewage system. Those beds are naturally rich in salts and metals. That included drill cuttings - dirt and rocks that companies dig up to get to the region’s gas-rich shale beds. And he found out about 40 percent of the landfill’s waste since 2010 had been solid oil and gas waste. Kruppa discovered the landfill was sending more leachate than the treatment plant was allowed to accept. “He said these are all indicators of frack waste.” “He goes, you have some very high numbers and as far as chlorides, conductivity, barium,” Kruppa said. He sent it to an engineer he used to work with. Kruppa began looking at test samples of the leachate. For years, the landfill sent Belle Vernon its leachate - liquid waste that collects at the landfill when rainwater trickles through its piles of garbage. That would be Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill, about a mile away in the town of Rostraver. The entrance to the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill in Rostraver, which accepts solid fracking waste and has sent what’s called leachate - liquid waste that comes out of the landfill when rainwater trickles through its piles of garbage - to the Belle Vernon sewage treatment plant. “We take in a neighboring community - Washington Township, we take in Belle Vernon, North Belle Vernon … but we also take in a landfill.” Kruppa, who’d only recently started his job as the municipal authority’s superintendent, thought about all the places that send waste to the plant. “We went through the whole gamut of things.” “We thought, was it something we were doing internally? Were we not processing enough sludge, maybe we aren’t pumping enough?” Kruppa said. Kruppa wondered if a recent upgrade could have something to do with it. The plant began flunking water quality tests for its state pollution discharge permit. Levels of bacteria and ammonia in the plant’s discharge to the river started going up. The plant uses micro-organisms - bugs - to break down raw sewage before it’s treated and released into the river.īut in 2018, those bugs stopped doing their job. Kruppa is the superintendent of the Belle Vernon Municipal Authority, and runs the town’s small sewage treatment plant on the banks of the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh. He recently discovered that naturally-occurring radioactive material found in the Marcellus shale was making it from the nearby Westmoreland landfill through the treatment plant and into the Monongahela River.Ībout a year and a half ago, Guy Kruppa realized something was wrong with his bugs. Gary Kruppa is in charge of Belle Vernon’s sewage treatment plant.
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