interstate 99

Posted on Fri, Jun. 24, 2005


Interstate 99


Lack of details delays Bauxsol tests

Officials waiting for information on acid-rock treatment plans

By Mike Joseph

[email protected]


A million-dollar test of a chemical treatment for acid-rock drainage will be delayed two or three weeks because the company selling the treatment to the state did not provide "critical information" in its plan, the state departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection said Thursday.

The DEP told PennDOT that a test plan submitted by the Australian company Virotec lacked sufficient detail about how the product Bauxsol will be applied and how its effectiveness will be monitored at the Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop.

Testing of up to 4,000 tons of Bauxsol was to have begun early next week, according to a schedule set forth by PennDOT Secretary Allen Biehler during a General Assembly hearing earlier this month in the state capital.

PennDOT environmental consultant Marv Klinger said the "missing critical information" was explained to Virotec during a meeting Wednesday.

Bob Yowell, DEP regional director, said testing cannot begin until DEP understands what Virotec and its Philadelphia engineering consultant, MWH Inc., intend to do. But Yowell gave the go-ahead to sink water collection and monitoring devices, called lysimeters, into the test areas in preparation.

"This whole thing, plus the delay in getting the plan, is pushing it back two or three weeks already from our original schedule," Yowell said.

The 4,000 tons of Bauxsol is now in a warehouse of the port of Chesapeake, Va., having been shipped by barge from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The first 1,000 tons of Bauxsol is scheduled to arrive at Skytop by rail next week. That shipment will be piled in a test staging area on the construction site between U.S. Route 322 and state Route 550 near the Matternville School. The rest of the test Bauxsol, if PennDOT uses it all, will be shipped by truck to save time, Klinger said.

Also Thursday, Yowell called for a meeting between PennDOT, DEP, Patton Township officials and a township property owner to try to overcome the owner's unwillingness to allow PennDOT to drill into a spoil pile on his property near Route 550.

The spoil pile has more than 400,000 cubic yards of excavated material, and the DEP wants to determine whether it contains acid-producing rocks.

"He didn't want somebody drilling though his aquifer into contaminated material," DEP hydrogeologist Randy Farmerie said.

Farmerie, who monitors groundwater at the acid-rock drainage site, said samples from residential and monitoring wells remain consistent at Skytop.

Some sulfate levels are above the 50 parts per million level that signifies that iron sulfide is oxidizing into sulfuric acid, but not since last October has the level reached 250 parts per million, the level considered excessive, Farmerie said.

But reddish iron stains on stones in Buffalo Run near Skytop will not disappear for a long time, PennDOT environmental consultant Gary Richards said.

"A stain is a stain," he said.