In August 2019, an anonymous tipster reported that a company located in Portage, Utah, was illegally dumping chemical waste in ponds, sewers, storm drains, and on the ground and had been doing so intentionally for months.
Later that month, a team of inspectors representing the state of Utah, a local health department and a fire department entered the American Chemical facility in Box Elder County.
They didn’t like what they saw at the plant that processed vegetable oils and contaminated glycerin, a type of sugar alcohol that the facility had received as a byproduct of biodiesel operations.
Inspectors found “foul smelling, dark water” in a ditch running from the facility to the Malad River which feeds the Bear River. Greasy water pooled in many parts of the facility often from overflowing containers.
“One such oily stream on the north edge of the facility had a dead female” hawk in it. Liquids on the north edge of the facility were directed through a muddy field, and then “eventually drain through an unlined ditch, under the railroad tracks, to settling/evaporation ponds located to the east.”
The state’s Department of Environmental Quality eventually fined the company $27,519 for violating the Utah Water Quality Act.
Read the rest of the story at greatsaltlakenews.org.
Great Salt Lake is at its lowest water level on record and continues to shrink. Utah Public Radio has teamed up with more than a dozen Utah organizations for the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a group that has come together to share multimedia stories and rigorous reports about the lake and ways to protect this critical body of water before it's too late.
