Fuel Depot Hearing Audience Given Science Lesson Experts Spar Over Spill Models As Debate Over Railroad’S Proposal Ends Second Session

The aroma of popcorn and snippets of pep band rallies drifted out of the gym as the Lake City Timberwolves basketball team beat Lewiston Thursday night.

But it was the grownups in the auditorium nearby that were going back to school.

More than 100 people came out for the second night of public hearings on a 500,000-gallon diesel refueling depot the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway wants to build near Rathdrum.

Thursday night, the audience and three Kootenai County commissioners leading the hearing got a science lesson.

Controversy over the depot stems from its location about 150 feet over the Spokane ValleyRathdrum Prairie aquifer, the source of drinking water for 400,000 North Idaho and Spokane County residents.

Ground-water experts hired by the railroad guarantee that no diesel will foul even a single drinking-water well, if diesel manages to penetrate layers of hightech protections built into the depot.

That assertion was tackled Thursday night by two experts invited by Friends of the Aquifer, the grassroots group opposing the depot.

The BNSF guarantees ignore natural uncertainties that come with hard-to-study ground water, charged Wade Hathhorn, a Portland consultant, urging the commission to reject the depot.

“If you do it … thinking there are absolutes here you are simply wrong and you’ve made an incorrect decision,” Hathhorn said.

Spill predictions by BNSF consultant John Buchanan, an Eastern Washington University professor, are flawed, said Tim Rapp, an opposition expert brought on six weeks ago.

Buchanan’s model - a sophisticated prediction of how diesel would move toward the aquifer if a spill occurred - didn’t account for spring flows that change the aquifer’s flow, said Rapp, a Sandpoint hydrologist.

“The Buchanan model is invalid,” he said. “Any other data based on the Buchanan model is equally invalid.”

But John Farr, a private ground water consultant also hired by the railroad, disputed the opposition’s claims during a break in the hearing.

Buchanan did factor in runoff, Farr said, and his model was based on earlier established modeling work by the Idaho Division of Environmental Quality and U.S. Geological Survey.

It is possible to guarantee safe drinking water, Farr said.

The railroad experts evaluated diesel pollution at numerous rail yards. Typically, the diesel plumes floating on ground water extended 200 feet past the spill location, he said, and never more than 1,000 feet.

Buchanan’s model shows that even in the worst case, if all 500,000 gallons of diesel gushed out, the plume would stop before it left the BNSF property and not hit any wells.

“The bottom line is the facility should never leak in the first place, so it’s all hypothetical,” Farr said. The hearing is expected to continue tonight, starting at 6 p.m.

This sidebar appeared with the story: HEARING The hearing is expected to continue tonight starting at 6 p.m.