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Keep planned treatment plant away from the Susquehanna River, urges George Turner.
Wyalusing may be more than an hour’s drive north of Wilkes-Barre, but a natural-gas-drilling wastewater treatment plant proposed in the municipality should concern anyone who lives near the Susquehanna River, a Wyoming County geologist said Saturday.
The Wyalusing Township Supervisors on Thursday held a public hearing to hear testimony on a zoning variance permit application filed by three companies planning to build an asphalt plant, a drilling mud plant and a wastewater treatment plant. State-certified professional geologist George Turner, of Eaton Township, attended the meeting and said he has concerns about the proximity of the three proposed plants to the Susquehanna River.
The hydraulic fracturing, or “frack” water treatment facility proposed by Ground/Water Treatment & Technology would be a closed-loop facility, in which treated water would be returned to gas drillers for reuse. Turner called the closed-loop system “exactly the way it should be done,” but said he still has concerns the plant might apply for a federal discharge permit to return treated water in the future. For that reason, the plant shouldn’t be built anywhere near the river, he said.
The Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority has also proposed building a frack water treatment facility next to its existing Hanover Township plant.
“If anybody even hints at the possibility of discharging anything into the Susquehanna River, everybody from the point of discharge all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay ought to be upset,” Turner said, adding that “I don’t want to see anything on the borders of the Susquehanna River because if anything leaks out or spills out we know right where it’s going.”
Waste discharges into the river are regulated by the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System and the state Department of Environmental Protection, which impose guidelines on the concentrations of pollutants which may be discharged. Turner said he suspects profit-minded companies discharging treated water into the river and streams would produce water with pollutant levels just under those maximum concentrations rather than treating it to the highest purity standards, which would be more expensive.
Turner said the soles of his feet still bear scars from stepping on broken glass and aluminum cans as he walked the banks of the Susquehanna as a child in the 1950s and 60s, when the river bank was still a dump. The river has come a long way since then, he said. Last year he went scuba diving along a mile stretch of the river and saw only two pieces of debris on the river bottom.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said, “and I don’t want anyone allowed to make us move backward.”