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4A | WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 2021 | APPEAL TRIBUNE An overturned tanker truck blocked Golf Club Road SE near Stayton on Tuesday. MARION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE DEQ removes fuel spilled from crash near Stayton Virginia Barreda Salem Statesman Journal USA TODAY NETWORK Golf Club Road near Stayton may be closed for up to a week while Oregon De- partment of Environmental Quality crews remove more than 2,000 gallons of fuel spilled from a tanker truck that overturned earlier this week. But mitigating and monitoring the contamination to nearby groundwater could take months, if not years. “It’s all about protecting human health,” said Geoff Brown, state on- scene coordinator for the Oregon Depart- ment of Environmental Quality. “That’s our top priority here. We want to get this cleaned up and we have to do it in a way that is protective of (the public).” The cleanup process will require dig- ging up, removing and replacing con- taminated soil. It also involves monitor- ing and treating contaminated ground- water to make sure it doesn’t seep into the drinking water of nearby residents. “When you have an event that con- taminates groundwater, that event can happen really quickly, but the cleanup can take a long time to accomplish,” Brown said. “The soil clean-up is going to be done within a week but the contami- nation to the groundwater is a lot more Shortage Continued from Page 1A a product that takes two years to grow. Seedlings that will be ready this year al- ready are sold, and those planted be- cause of new demand will take time to grow. “We were already sold out before the fire came,” Kathy LeCompte, owner of Brooks Tree Farm north of Salem, said. “Trees that are only one year old are al- ready in the ground. There isn’t any- thing we can do to put more in the ground for 2022. It’s a two-year crop.” The need in Oregon for seedlings af- ter the fires is about two to three times the typical number needed for refores- tation, Kyle Abraham, chief of the Ore- gon Department of Forestry’s Private Forests Division, said in a news release. “Seedlings were already in short sup- ply in Oregon before the fires,” Abraham said. “Now, rough estimates are that somewhere between 80 (million) and 140 million additional seedlings could be needed to reforest just the non-feder- al lands that burned in 2020.” Private landowners affected more While large-scale logging companies can and are moving operations to focus on burned timber while it’s still usable, including replanting with seedlings al- ready on hand, Oregon State University Extension Service Forester Glenn Ah- rens said smaller landowners are having a harder time adapting to the needs of an unexpected, wildfire-caused har- vest. “There’s huge new demand for trees over and above what was in the pipe- line,” he said. Last year’s wildfires burned an esti- complicated ... there’s a number of ways to effectively treat it, but they all take time.” Brown said the drinking water con- tamination for nearby residents is mini- mal, though crews are closely monitor- ing one home near the crash site where residents use well water. Crews are treating the groundwater at the residence to ensure no one is ex- posed to the gasoline and make sure va- por is not coming out of the soil and per- meating the home. The house is current- ly uninhabitable, Brown said. Environmental quality crews will also be periodically checking the air quality at the mobile home park across the street from the worksite. “It’s possible that our work could pro- duce ... gasoline odors,” Brown said. “Were something to happen where we detected a higher concentration (of un- safe gases), we would shut down work until we figure out how to solve that problem.” Tanker truck crash The 2019 Kenworth tanker truck and trailer overturned early Tuesday morn- ing in the 9500 block of Golf Club Road SE near Stayton prompting the evacua- tion of 12 homes in the area. mated 400,000 acres of private land, Ahrens said. Those landowners gener- ally only make deals for seedlings before a harvest, but the fires now mean they must cut down damaged trees or risk them becoming valueless. “They’re going to be competing with the people in the business that, some of them, started ordering trees before the fires were out,” Ahrens said. OSU Extension Service and the Ore- gon Small Woodlands Association are surveying landowners affected by the fires and collecting information on their needs. Ahrens estimates about 1,000 small- er, private woodlands owners were af- fected by the fires. Already 325 land- owners have replied to the survey, Ah- rens said. “It adds up to 5 million trees or more that may be needed,” Ahrens said. “These are folks who so far have not been able to order trees elsewhere.” The residents were able to take tem- porary shelter at the Stayton Community Center until additional assistance was provided by the American Red Cross. Most residents were able to return home by mid-afternoon. Marion County Sheriff ’s Office au- thorities said the truck, belonging to Oregon Petroleum Transport Company, was carrying approximately 11,400 gal- lons of fuel. Brown estimates between 2,100 and 2,200 gallons of fuel were spilled in the crash. Sheriff ’s office investigators suspect fatigue may have played a role in the crash. No arrests have been made and no citations have been issued. No injuries were reported. Dirt movers After the wreck is removed, clean-up is primarily made up of excavation, Brown said. Crews are working with a few large excavators and a Cat. The de- partment hired contractors with 19 to 20 dump trucks that haul the soil to Coffin Butte Landfill near Corvallis. Brown said it will be hard to deter- mine how much soil was contaminated until the end of the clean-up. The amount of contamination depends on a variety of factors such as the type of soil, how deep groundwater is and how long crews wait to start the clean-up process. “It’s a lot of making adjustments on the fly,” Brown said. But it’s estimated each truck will make two to three trips a day to dump soil at the landfill. When the digging is done, the soil will be backfilled with a combination of rocks and topsoil, Brown said. Environmental quality officials esti- mate the contaminated groundwater — only about 6 feet below the surface — is moving west or northwest. Crews are installing four monitoring wells to sample groundwater to deter- mine the level of contamination. They’ve also installed about seven or eight sparge wells — shallow wells drilled 13 to 15 feet that use pressurized air to strip gasoline and chemicals from groundwater — to make a barrier be- tween the spill location and the unoccu- pied residence. Officials estimate the system should be up and running within a day or two. Virginia Barreda is the breaking news and public safety reporter for the States- man Journal. She can be reached at 503- 399-6657 or at vbarreda@statesman- journal.com. Follow her on Twitter at @vbarreda2. Contract crews replant trees on Weyerhauser land in Marion County on March 2. The company lost roughly 125,000 acres of trees to wildfires. PHOTOS BY BRIAN HAYES / STATESMAN JOURNAL OSU trying to compile bulk order Ahrens said the next step is using the information they collect to make bulk orders. “We’re looking at backlog of years for these folks to get trees,” Ahrens said. “When you say you want a half-million trees, you’re able to be more competitive with your order.” Gordon said landowners looking for help or with questions about replanting extensions can call an ODF stewardship forester or an OSU Extension forester. “There are provisions for us to have some leniency in offering extensions around the two-year requirement in ex- tenuating circumstances like the wild- fire case,” Gordon said. An 18-inch, 2-year-old Douglas fir seedling is planted between burnt trees.
