Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
I asked for further analysis to be done on where the flows were coming from. Meanwhile, I'd
gone down to the Martha Oil Field and walked it, and I was appalled--absolutely appalled--
to see what Ashland Oil was dumping down those hillsides. I mean, you'd go up there and
you'd see this eroded ditch coming out of a wellhead, running down the hill toward a stream,
and it would be brown-orange colored from the stuff that had come out of there over time. It
was just running raw down the hillside--an absolute disregard for the environment. I was
really appalled.
When I analyzed how I was going to get a project like this done--no matter how much
Congressman Perkins wanted it or the legislation authorized it--the fact is that you have to
go through a process that ensures the environmental impacts are acceptable. If it's wrong,
impacts are unacceptable, then you shouldn't do it. We had the environmental impact process
with EPA, Fish and Wildlife, and everyone else participating.
We made contact with the EPA regional office in Atlanta and started talking to them about
all these problems. We found out that the commonwealth's laws weren't sufficient to
prohibit Ashland Oil from their harmful actions, and they didn't follow the EPA federal
mandates--they had not adopted those as standards. Thus, statutes wouldn't provide us any
way to solve the problem with Ashland Oil, and we'd never get through the environmental
process to be able to do the project.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, we had Huntington District doing further studies as to how the
stuff got to the Big Sandy River and to the potential lake and what would happen. What we
discovered was that there were two components, surface runoff and ground water. We also
found a fault area through there, so we traced that.
What we found was that the way the fault lay, the subsurface water, the ground water, would
be cut off before it got to the lake area and would go elsewhere. Where the aquifers came in,
they met up against an impervious wall area, and they were diverted elsewhere. An important
find--the briny ground water was cut off from going into the lake project area.
That was very important because it takes something like 60 or 70 years for ground water
contamination to clean up naturally. Surface runoff can be stopped, and it's an almost
immediate cleanup.
So, once we found that we had cut off the ground water, then we felt we could come up with
a solution preventing the lake from being a Dead Sea. Ground water was taken care of; all we
had now to do was take care of the surface runoff from the Martha Oil Field. To take care of
the surface runoff, we needed to have the Commonwealth of Kentucky adopt laws that would
prohibit Ashland Oil from its irresponsible discharge of brine into the streams.
So, with this, we developed a scheme that said we would design the lake, and we would
isolate the lake from the Martha Oil Field by closing down discharges and the brine source.
Huntington District had come back with a proposal that we buy out the Martha Oil Field
from Ashland for million. I thought that was not a worthwhile expenditure of federal
funds. We really ought to get Ashland to do what the nation had mandated, and that was to
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