BELFAST, Maine — A Belfast potato-processing company has been mandated to pay a $15,090 fine to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection after discharging ammonia into the tidewaters of the Passagassawakeag River.
According to an administrative consent agreement between Penobscot McCrum LLC and the Maine DEP that was signed by Commissioner Patricia Aho in March, in addition to paying the penalty, the company also agreed to adhere to the conditions and requirements of its waste discharge license.
Officials came to Belfast to inspect the facility on May 19, 2014, after receiving a complaint from reporter Jordan Bailey at the Republican Journal in Belfast, who had taken water samples around Penobscot Bay and found unusually high pH levels around the Penobscot McCrum plant, Phil Garwood, an environmental specialist with the Maine DEP, said Monday.
“We periodically get citizen complaints, but having someone who’s actually done testing on their own is kind of unusual,” Garwood said.
The DEP sent its own specialists in to test and investigate. They found that the facility had an automatic cooling system that was malfunctioning and was releasing small amounts of ammonia into a licensed discharge point.
Penobscot McCrum’s waste discharge license limited the pH in the area of the outfall pipe to the range of 6.0 to 8.5. But in May 2014, the pH level recorded as high as 10.4. Pure ammonia has a pH value of 11.5.
According to Garwood, there’s been no documented effect on fisheries or wildlife from the discharge.
“There’s so much water moving in the upper part of the bay or the river. It was a very small flow of discharge into a very large flow of natural water,” he said. “It would be unlikely to have really toxic effects.”
Jay McCrum of Penobscot McCrum said Monday that his company had gotten a new automatic cooling system to replace an old one that wasn’t working properly.
“We thought [the new system] was calibrated correctly,” he said. “Come to find out, it was not calibrated correctly.”
Part of the reason the fine was levied against Penobscot McCrum is because in order for the Maine DEP’s waste discharge program to work, companies must reliably comply with their expectations. Garwood said that the Maine DEP does not employ enough people to monitor all companies in Maine that participate.
“Our system is based on the expectation that they’ll do the testing as described in the license, using methods approved by the DEP and the state of Maine,” he said. “That they will keep their records properly, that they will do the reports. It’s all based on them being rigorous about what they do and on them being honest.”
But Penobscot McCrum did not keep its records properly, Garwood said, and “we don’t believe they did the sampling properly either. They didn’t live up to expectations.”
McCrum said that his company in fact had not correctly put some documentation in its reports.
“It wasn’t intentional,” he said. “It was a mistake.”
Since the DEP’s involvement, he said, there have been no situations with ammonia in the discharge.
“We recognized the problem, and we worked with the DEP,” he said. “They were very cooperative and very helpful.”
Garwood said that the $15,090 penalty is designed to be a reason for the problem to not happen again. He said that the amount is not the smallest and not the largest fine that has been levied by the DEP. Years ago, when the department had to do a lot of enforcement against paper mills, the penalties could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nowadays, with fewer paper mills in the state, fine amounts have tended to be smaller.