State agency intervenes following dumping of drums
Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Four concrete mixing drums, formerly attached to Cooper Concrete transport trucks, are being removed from the stump dump on Trafalgar Road following their discovery by a local man.
Leon Huff said he was driving by the stump dump Wednesday, April 23, and noticed the large drums. He stopped to take pictures because only wood materials - mostly tree stumps - are allowed to be left there by members of the Property Owners Association and their guests.
Neff Basore, a senior vice president for Cooper Communities Inc., which owns Cooper Concrete, said the drums were placed in the dump based on what company officials believed to be solid information that it was allowed.
Knowing the drums and their contents are not considered hazardous material - information imparted to company officials by an environmental expert - Basore said CCI contacted stump-dump owner Tom Fredericks, who told them he could and would accept the containers.
"We did what we thought was the right thing to do," Basore said of workers placing the drums in the dump. "We were given bad information (by the dump owner )."
As Huff went about recording the activity, he said a man, whom Huff identified as Fredericks, told him to leave the area. Later in the week, Huff returned to the site and found the concrete drums had been pushed to the back of the property in what he believed was an attempt to move them out of view from those passing by.
"There's a drop-off back there of about 100 feet, and I knew they were going to push them down there out of sight," Huff said.
As vice chairman of the Bella Vista Patriots, a local watchdog group, Huff informed Chairman Jim Parsons of the illegal dumping. Parsons contacted the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality's solid-waste division to inquire about the concrete drums.
Justin Sparrow, a local investigator with the ADEQ, told Parsons that dumping the drums there is a violation of Arkansas law, in addition to being in violation of POA regulations.
When CCI was contacted by state officials to advise them they would have to remove the drums, Basore said that is exactly what they did.
CCI is now trying to find a place to take the containers. Basore said three of them could be cut up for scrap if they can find a buyer, but the fourth one is full of hardened concrete caused by an accident a number of years ago.
A representative from the ADEQ visited the dump April 28 and reported finding no violations, Basore said.
"We try to be good corporate citizens," Basore said of CCI. "We were (originally ) told we were doing nothing wrong disposing (of the drums ) in this fashion."
Huff and Parsons also returned to the site April 28. Huff noted the drums had been taken from the back of the stump dump. They were near the entrance, next to a bulldozer.
"Cooper would not have removed the drums if they weren't in the wrong, " Parsons said. "They knew they didn't have a leg to stand on."
On April 28, it appeared the Cooper Concrete logos had been removed from the drums, Huff said.
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