Two state agencies are investigating who illegally dumped more than 100 plastic bags full of what appears to be hazardous concrete asbestos board (CAB) at two sites in Jefferson County this month.

“I've been here 11 years, and that's the biggest illegal asbestos dumping that I have seen,” said Mike Shults, an air quality specialist with the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency (ORCAA), based in Olympia. Shults covers six counties for the agency. “If there had been a bigger one, I would have heard.”

“It's dangerous if it becomes airborne, and standards are zero tolerance with it. You want to control all emissions. That's why we treat it as hazardous,” Shults said of the asbestos, which he said appears to be mint green cement siding.

Air quality specialist Pinky Feria Mingo, who is leading the investigation locally and who also works for Jefferson County Public Health part-time, is hoping someone steps forward with information. There were 55 bags dumped in bushes along a state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) road off Cape George Road and another 52 bags near Lake Anderson in the Port Hadlock area.

“If anybody hears something, say something and let me know,” said Feria Mingo.

Mingo, two officials from the state Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) and an official from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) responded to the dump sites to look into the bags and start an investigation. L&I responded because that agency is responsible for ensuring worker safety in the removal of asbestos.

Looking into the bags initially, Feria Mingo said, officials saw the word “asbestos” written on some of the bags, and that's what prompted other agencies to get involved.

The investigation now involves an alphabet soup of agencies, with L&I and ORCAA officials taking the lead, but with the DNR, the federal EPA and possibly the state Department of Ecology (DOE) also potentially being involved, depending on whether more bags are found and what tests on the contents reveal.

FIRST BAGS FOUND

The first bags were found by some people walking in the area of Cape George on Sept. 13 ; the second bags were found Sept. 19 near Lake Anderson in the Port Hadlock area. (A more detailed description of the Anderson Lake site was not available.)

“We don't know if they were from the same place. We didn't have the right equipment,” Feria Mingo said of officials initially leaving the bags in place off Cape George and calling for better protective equipment in order to examine the contents of the bags.

CAB cannot be disposed of at the Jefferson County Transfer Station, which is not far from where the bags were found off Cape George Road. There are no disposal sites in Jefferson County that can accept asbestos waste. The nearest approved facility to dispose of CAB is in Port Angeles at the Clallam County Regional Transfer Station.

“It is more expensive [to dispose of] than regular garbage,” Feria Mingo said of CAB. “But the expensive part of removing it [from a home or business] is the labor, not the disposal, so it appears that it was a paid contractor.”

The garbage bags were hidden in bushes in a ditch off Cape George Road.

“It was all the way back and to the side of the gate, so you wouldn't have seen it unless you were walking,” Feria Mingo said.

There could be both a civil penalty and potentially a criminal citation for illegally dumping the construction waste, she said.

The cost of disposing of asbestos is more than normal garbage, Shults said, noting that now that the CAB has been dumped illegally, whoever did that could also face an ORCAA fine of as much as $14,915 “for breaking air quality rules.”

“If there was willful neglect, it could go into the criminal realm, too,” Shults said.

INVESTIGATION

One of the first things Feria Mingo was doing to find the responsible party was to pull all of the asbestos-removal permits that had been filed in Jefferson County for remodeling to see if anyone had obtained a permit.

It's possible that someone could have hired a contractor to remove the asbestos and then that contractor failed to dispose of it properly, she said.

“There are so many scenarios. We're just guessing at the moment,” said Robert Moody, compliance supervisor with ORCAA, who is based in Olympia. “We're trying to figure out why it is here and who did it.

“There are more questions at the moment than there are answers,” Moody said.

TRASH IN THE WOODS

Steve Bishop, who owns Alpenfire Cider at 220 Pocket Lane, just off Cape George Road near Beckett Point, said his property abuts land where the state DNR has done clear-cutting.

“The road where they dump all the time is a logging road,” he said.

It is not uncommon for people to park in the DNR entrance, which is blocked off, and then hike up the road into the woods.

Bishop said the area has been used as a forest waste site and that deer carcasses, old cabinetry and old beds – “hillbilly trash,” he called it – is often disposed of in that area.

“That's ongoing,” he said.

“It's all gone now,” said Bishop's wife, Nancy, on Friday, Sept. 23.

But the investigation into who deposited the waste is still ongoing.