During the state Department of Environmental Quality permitting meeting last week in Hennessey, a room full of protesters decided that registering their water wells with the Oklahoma Water Resources Board could help their cause.

Landowners near that proposed dump site, and other Hennessey homeowners and citizens, said they want to stop Sooner Solid Solutions LLC’s solid waste processing disposal from locating near their farms, homes, businesses and their town.

If approved, Sooner’s waste will include “spent caustic from refineries and other industrial waste.”

And all of that waste will be from out-of-state for Marathon Petroleum Corp. Also, Marathon is the only client for the Sooner waste company owned by David Dollar of Hennessey.

“We rely on OWRB water well data,” said Patrick Riley, manager of the DEQ’s Solid Waste and Sustainability Unit during the state’s informational meeting last week.

“Or, the applicant (Sooner Solid Solutions LLC) would check for the location of water wells,” the DEQ manager said. “And, it’s incumbent that the applicant can provide any information that might be required for the proximity to groundwater resources.”

Get Water Wells Permitted That discussion included Mike Maly from the audience who stood up and encouraged all those in the audience, and all other landowners, to get state permits for all of their water wells from the OWRB (405-530-8800).

“If your home is one that’s been there 100 years and the well was hand dug, it’s probably not permitted and it sure won’t hurt to check it out,” he said.

Maly said he’d be the “point man” and had already started putting together a map of all the registered wells in the Hennessey area.

He asked everyone with wells, or springs, to also text him (405-830-1669) with their quarter section information.

“But first, get them registered with the OWRB,” he said. “And you will have to do that on your own. It’s just a call, the way I understand it, and the way it worked for me.”

The OWRB website also offers online permitting of water well and dam permits ( https:// oklahoma. gov/owrb/water-permitting. html) and “provides forms, guidance, and contact info.”

“I have water board-approved water wells,” said Anne (Casey) Jones in the audience. “And, I have cattle tank water wells that are 20 to 25 feet that are not state Water Permit Board approved.

“Do we need to go get all these wells approved? Because you’re not going to find them if they are not on the water board site.”

“Yes, we typically check the OWRB website for information,” said Hillary Young, the DEQ’s chief engineer of the Land Protection Division. “So that would be a good comment to make.”

Water Quality is Just Common Sense

“There’s quite a bit of concern here about water quality,” said Richard Shimanek, who lives near the planned waste site. “My place has five generations on this farm. We’ve got a spring that goes across two of our farms right there and we’ve got three water wells and none of them are deeper than 20 feet.

“If something does spill and contaminates our water, I get dead cattle,” Shimanek said. “How are you gonna fix that?

“I mean, a slap on the wrist, or a fine? What’s our recourse? Lawsuits? Then we’re still stuck.”

Shimanek continued that he, and others, wondered how this proposed project had even reached this far.

“How could a project even be allowed to come to fruition, to be installed, when there’s this kind of danger? It’s clear to us: It’s not if something would happen; it will be when something happens.

“There is the spent caustic that we’re talking about, the fly ash that’s in this application. Regardless of how they’re classified, this under the (state) rules, I don’t want to breathe in the fly ash, and neither do you.

“I don’t want any of that caustic waste in my water, or on my soil. I don’t want to smell it, I don’t want to breathe it and now it comes to you in your technical review.

“I realize you have to give it, you know, your due diligence. But where does the common sense, where does the morality come into play in the decision?” DEQ and CC Rules Differ Although the DEQ and Corporation Commission each apparently have a say in the permitting of the proposed underground waste disposals, there are a few rules that are different.

Audience members at the Hennessey Public Library on Jan. 6 learned that, unlike the state Corporation Commission, the DEQ doesn’t have any rules that would keep a Tier III solid waste landfill from being located near residences, or close to a town.

The Corporation Commission requires that all Tier III solid waste processing facility of non-hazardous industrial waste (NHIW) must be located three miles from town limits.

However, Sooner Solid Solutions LLC’s planned site is located approximately two miles northeast of Hennessey.

So Sooner has asked for “an exception” in its permit request to allow for that one mile.

The Hennessey town trustees don’t want that facility near the town and hired attorney Michael Booze to represent them.

That’s the same attorney hired by landowners near the proposed waste site and Booze offices in Oklahoma City and in Kingfisher.

DEQ Technical Review Continues

An audience member asked: “On your (technical) review, how much longer?”

“We anticipate having a response to the applicant soon,” Riley said. “I can’t say exactly when. We want to be very careful about what we do. It goes through a series of reviews. The permit engineers will look at it. It goes through the chief engineer and other management at DEQ before a response goes out. It’s typical for an application like this to go through an iterative process so that there won’t necessarily be an issuance, or a denial, right away.”

He added, “It’ll be a request for additional information, a request for clarification. So it can still be a while before there’s either a draft permit issued, or a denial. It’s important to know, and I’d like to point this out, that the process that we’re going through, the permitting process, is defined by Oklahoma law and administrative code.”

How Long Will it Take, And...

DEQ officials were asked at last week’s Hennessey meeting how long the entire process will take.

“If it goes all the way, if we issue a draft and it goes all the way to an administrative hearing, it would take at least a year,” said the DEQ’s Young.

“At least,” she said again. “That’s what a lot of us here are concerned about,” another audience member said.