Time for the people to press BNSF

My effort to pry loose Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co.’s upgrade plans for its leak-prone North Idaho refueling facility has been derailed. So now I need your help to get the investigation back on track.

Our story so far: BNSF crushed a plastic pipe designated to carry wastewater and spilled diesel between the Hauser platform and its holding tanks. The resulting leak violated two state laws and degraded the aquifer more than 400,000 of us rely on for drinking water.

Now BNSF refuses to share proposed fixes with the public as it enters a six-month process of negotiating a consent decree with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.

The railroad asks us to have faith it’s developing the best solution. But BNSF has done nothing to earn our trust. If the railroad tries to pinch pennies in handling its Hauser headache, we need to know while there’s still time to lobby for a better plan.

In refusing to submit upgrade plans to public scrutiny, BNSF junior executive Mark Stehly and flack Gus Melonas first tried a kill-the-messenger approach. They claimed I was rude to ask questions they didn’t want to answer. Of course, they didn’t reveal their plans to any of my more-genteel colleagues, either.

Next Melonas tried to hide behind the consent-decree negotiations. “We obviously must work through the DEQ process,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Under this direction we cannot provide specifics. However, we are developing the correct engineering solutions.”

So I called Geoff Harvey, IDEQ’s point man on the spill. His department has no objection to the railroad sharing proposed plans for fixing the leaky pipe system.

But even with no more fig leaves to hide behind, Melonas refused to budge. “BNSF will continue to work on a corrective action plan in consultation with IDEQ,” he e-mailed after I informed him of Harvey’s comments. “BNSF is preparing an alternatives analyses for improvements to the facility and procedures as well as remediation of the site. Until completed, it would be inappropriate to release incomplete information publicly.”

Meanwhile, we have to rely on the platform’s 120,000-gallon overflow capacity to protect the aquifer from a catastrophic spill. Melonas helpfully pointed out that the facility’s tank-farm containment volume – which exceeds 740,000 gallons – is about 250 percent of the regulatory requirement. That would peg the regulation spill-handling volume at about 300,000 gallons. So with the pipes to the tank farm shut down indefinitely, the facility now has a platform spill-handling capacity of less than half the facility’s minimum required volume? Yikes.

The railroad knows what its upgrade alternatives are. So why won’t it release them? Could the company be hoping to get off as cheaply as possible with IDEQ? If so, it would put BNSF in an awkward position to reveal a comprehensive upgrade plan it doesn’t end up following. To dispel that suspicion, the firm must come clean now.

If you still want to know what fixes the railroad is considering, I can’t help you. But you can help yourselves. In addition to serving as regional flack, Gus Melonas is listed prominently on the BNSF Web site as our “community contact.” That means he’s standing by to address your questions and concerns. You can call him at (206) 625-6220 or fax him at (206) 625-6115. If you prefer e-mail, try gus.melonas@bnsf.com. If he divulges any Hauser upgrade plans to you, pass them along and I’ll share them in the coming weeks.