Woodland Pulp's payment for discharge violations helps river

Monies from a penalty assessed for discharge violations into the St. Croix River by Woodland Pulp will be used to help reduce the amount of untreated wastewater and stormwater entering the river from Calais.
On April 30 Woodland Pulp and the Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Attorney General's Office signed a consent agreement for numerous violations dating back to 2013. The $64,000 that was assessed as a penalty by the DEP will instead be paid to the City of Calais for the completion of projects to reduce inflow and infiltration into the city's sewer system. Those projects will reduce the volume of untreated wastewater and stormwater entering the river from the city. State law allows for a company, instead of paying a penalty to the state, to provide funding for an environmental project that benefits the local area. The project was undertaken in connection with the settlement of the enforcement action taken by the DEP for violations of Maine's Protection and Improvement of Waters law.
Scott Beal, spokesman for Woodland Pulp, comments, "When we learned of the possibility of funding this project for our neighboring community of Calais, we at Woodland Pulp were very happy to support this project, as it is related to improving water quality of the St. Croix River and was supportive of a local environmental improvement project."
The violations include discharges that exceeded the company's license limits for zinc, copper, cadmium, tetrochlorodibenzofuran, silver and wastewater temperature. They also include 23 discharges of effluent, leachate, wastewater or other pollutants to state waters or the ground. Those discharges included: 128,000 gallons of primary treated effluent to a stream leading to the St. Croix in March 2015; more than a million gallons of cooling water to the spill containment area in March 2015; 2.9 million gallons of effluent, with a million gallons discharged to the St. Croix, in September 2016; 1.18 million gallons of effluent, with 90,000 gallons discharged to the St. Croix, in September 2016; 800,000 gallons of leachate and stormwater to the ground and Airline Stream in April 2017; and 530,000 gallons of effluent to a spill pond and waters leading to the St. Croix in August 2018.
Beal points out that some of the violations listed "had a greater impact than others, such as events that involved the main effluent force main."
Brian Kavanah, director of the DEP's Bureau of Water Quality, agrees that the discharge of effluent was the most serious violation. He explains that the agency has a variety of tools for addressing noncompliance by a company -- from warnings, to letters of violation, to consent agreements with a penalty -- based on the severity or duration of the violations. Lower-level tools would have been used for earlier violations, but if there are a certain number of violations or they are similar in nature "we get to a point where we need to take a penalty action" to clear the record for violations that can be over a period of time. The number and nature of the violations are not uncommon for a large industrial facility over a fairly long time, he says.
Along with the payment to the City of Calais, the company must by the end of this year replace a force main to the secondary treatment lagoon and submit a plan for repair or replacement of its secondary treated effluent return line.
Woodland Pulp already has been taking steps to prevent future discharge violations, with Beal pointing out that the company spent over $2 million late last year to replace 2,000 feet of effluent pipeline that runs across Route 1. He adds, "This spring, we're on course to spend several million dollars more to replace the remaining 6,000 feet of effluent force main to the secondary wastewater lagoons."