Chapter 25 Phillips Hazardous Waste

When I first started at PPCo Research and Development I heard stories about the waste pits back west of the Pilot Plant. They were back in the trees along Sand Creek. These things, and I get this second hand from guys who had to survey their locations, were so noxious it make their eyes water just being down wind of them. No telling what went in them. Knowing a bit about geology. I know a meandering creek such as Sand Creek leaves over time a lot of porous sediments just right for migrating plumes. Unlined pits for hazardous waste and toxins make good sources from which these plumes can form. I also know that they tend to migrate to creeks and other surface bodies of water. So my best guess is these pits were unlined due to the fact it was not required at the time. The image of the area now shows that Conoco/PPCo now has four oxidizing ponds in the southern part of the picture. The round white donuts in the square green ponds are bubbles from the aerators in the ponds helping the bugs degrade oil and other nasties in the water. I can not be certain of the location of the old pits. My best guess is the big brown scar to the north west in the trees. Either that or they are hidden by the trees in the middle left of the picture. this is clearly a land fill. You can see the edge of the material to the south where they are pushing it into the trees. I can't say if this is Phillips property, but more than likely it is. There is a big debris pile in the upper right, the white area. It looks like a truck or dozer parked by the black area. There is a chance that the ponds were located where they have built a retaining wall and run-off containment basin just above and left of the containment ponds. The long rectangular structure that looks to discharge into a Sand Creek tributary. Anyone care to do some sampling down stream of this area in Sand Creek? I certainly hope you don't fish there. Sand Creek and Eliza Creek also catch the run-off from the National Zinc Superfund site. In 1984 the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was passed. This was called the cradle to grave act. This required companies producing listed hazardous materials to provide employees with Material Safety Data Sheets and to also track and inventory all wastes produced until they were destroyed. Cradle to grave. Well one day we start getting all these steel drums out at R&D. Turns out Phillips was none to diligent in disposing of the hazardous materials they produced and the government was shipping them back to them after finding them and tracing them back to PPCo. There are lots of ways to save money. I guess letting Sanford and Son hall your hazardous waste off for you is one way. In the event, they had to destroy it. Problem was nobody knew what was in the drums. A lot of them were rusty and were encased in plastic bags to prevent leakage. There were a lot of them. So Phillips set there engineers to designing an incinerator and a scrubber. Soon they were burning the waste and barrels all in one go. They patented the incinerator. John Mihm was the head of R&D at the time. You might remember him as Mihm the Merciless. Well we were going through layoffs about this time. When weren't we. eh? So he had a great club to find volunteers to man the incinerator. Kind of like the old Royal Navy Press Gangs. If your worth to your current organization was suspect, you were given the choice to be laid off, or work with hazardous and toxic chemicals all day. Nice choice, wot? I guess they had plenty of "volunteers" because the incinerator ran day and night for years. I don't currently see any trace of it on the Google images, nor do I see the Pilot Plant. Looks like they are cleaning up the place. Next up, Benzene spills in Borger and Plastics Plant explosions in Pasadena.