Omya: No Waste
Trucked to Mine
By John Freitag

In a surprise announcement, Omya Vice President Jim Hamilton informed members of the Elizabeth Mine Community Advisory Group (EMCAG) of his company’s decision not to proceed with attempts to bring tailing waste from its plant near Proctor to the Superfund site in Strafford.

In an email to EMCAG members Tuesday, Hamilton cited modeling that showed "costs primarily related to transportation to be prohibitive" as the reason for withdrawing.

Omya’s attempt to bring chemically-treated marble wastes to the site has been controversial since a pilot project using 200 tons of the waste was first proposed last spring. After community members discovered that a legislative-mandated study of the wastes was ongoing, the decision was made to postpone any consideration of the project until the results of the study was completed.

The study, released in January of this year, found that although the wastes were contaminated with a toxic chemical used in Omya process, they did not constitute a threat to human health and the environment as they are currently being stored in holding cells and old marble quarries near the plant.

Omya came back to Strafford this spring with a proposal to bring up to 125,000 tons of their waste product from a new dewatering plant being built at their Florence site. It is hoped that once dewatered, the waste will not have the same chemical contamination problems. EMCAG members, with the help of staff from Vermonters for a Clean Environment and their technical advisors, prepared a list of questions and had started work on developing a process for examining whether using the Omya waste at the mine site would be a safe.

Now that Omya has withdrawn, limestone and clay are likely to be the materials used in the future at the clean up—now in its eighth year.

New Problems

Work this season at the Superfund site—focused almost entirely on efforts to deal with a spike of iron caused by work done to date—got off to a rough start when a contractor started drawing large amounts of water for use at the site from tiny Lords Brook in nearby Thetford.

People living on Picknell Road in Thetford complained to their selectboard when they found a tanker truck repeatedly drawing water from the brook. According to Thetford Conservation Committee member Lilian Shen, six truckloads, or over 21,000 gallons a day, were being taken from this small brook. The improvement in Lords Brook water quality is to be a second phase of the Superfund project.

In yet another interesting twist, last year’s testing of Lords Brook found it to meet all water quality standards. It is not known if withdrawing of large amounts of water would have negative impact on the brook, but the Thetford Selectboard pushed to have water currently needed for the project to be taken from the much larger West Branch of the Ompompanoosuc where there would be far less potential impact.

EPA project manager Ed Hathaway and state project manager John Schmeltzer have since met with the contractor on the site and they "came to the same opinion." Water from now on will be taken from the West Branch, as has been the case in the past.

Project manger Ed Hathway reports that work is now going on six days a week to install a million-dollar interim treatment plant to deal with the spike in iron that caused the West Branch to turn orange last summer all the way from Strafford to Union Village.

Work is also ongoing to put in new horizontal zones in the bottom of the largest tailing dam to hopefully also mitigate the recent spike in iron.