We’re returning to a story we last wrote about over a year ago. In October 2013 MDN told you the radical national anti-drilling organization Clean Water Action (CWA) had sued a small Pennsylvania company by the name of Waste Treatment Corporation (WTC) in Warren, PA in federal court claiming the company continued to accept, treat and discharge Marcellus drilling wastewater into the Allegheny River (see CWA Sues/Accuses Waste Treatment Corp of Continued Shale Pollution). WTC was supposed to have stopped that practice two years earlier, in 2011, after then-Secretary of the Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), Michael Krancer, got all such operations to cease and desist. Responses to the CWA lawsuit from both the WTC and the DEP raised more questions than they answered for us (see Waste Treatment, PA DEP Respond to CWA Lawsuit). In September 2014, CWA announced they had reached a settlement of the case with WTC agreeing to immediately stop accepting/discharging Marcellus wastewater (even though they say they don’t), install expensive new equipment, and then restart accepting Marcellus wastewater processing again (see CWA v Waste Treatment Corp Wastewater Discharge Lawsuit Settled). The new news is that WTC has installed the aforementioned new technology, news that we get from a press release from the company that sold them the technology. What we don’t know is when, or if, WTC will once again begin to accept Marcellus Shale wastewater at the plant…
