Idaho Asphalt’S Solvent Spills Cleaned Up

From 1980 until 1992, Idaho Asphalt Supply Inc. routinely poured a cancer-causing industrial solvent into a drain that led directly to the ground, Idaho environmental officials say.

For those 12 years, Idaho Asphalt dumped roughly a gallon a day of acetone and trichloroethylene into a sink drain during product tests.

Following a consent order with the Idaho Division of Environmental Quality, the solvent-soaked soils were excavated before any solvent hit ground water.

The company stopped the dumping following an official inspection.

“They were easy to work with. They didn’t fight anything,” said Mike Gregory, Idaho’s hazardous waste enforcement coordinator.

Trichloroethylene, known as TCE, is notorious in the region. TCE oozed out of Spokane’s North Side landfill and Spokane County’s Colbert landfill, contaminating well water. The Hanley Avenue well in Coeur d’Alene was shut down in the mid-1990s to guard water users from TCE coming from Deming Industries.

At Idaho Asphalt, investigators also discovered in 1992 that the company was illegally getting rid of diesel and other solvents by evaporating them instead of disposing of them as hazardous materials. The company was told to stop the evaporation method.

Soil excavation down to 13 feet removed all the solvents, Gregory said. The company no longer uses TCE, operations manager Alex Cross said Thursday. And acetone, which is highly flammable, is recycled on site now, Cross said.

The company also had a few problems with asphalt spills in the 1980s, according to DEQ records. But a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency investigation in 1987 - triggered by citizen complaints - turned up no underground contamination or fouled ground water, said John Sutherland of the state agency.