Truck stop fined for excessive pollution in wastewater

Waspy's Truck Stop south of Audubon has a convenience store, restaurant, hotel, truck wash and service center. (Image from Google Earth)

A western Iowa truck stop near Audubon has violated its pollutant limits more than 500 times in recent years and has caused the city to expel elevated concentrations of contaminants into a creek that flows to the East Nishnabotna River, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Waspy’s Truck Stop opened in 2018 and has a truck wash that is used to clean the insides of animal trailers. Wastewater from the site is piped to the city’s wastewater treatment facility, which discharges into Bluegrass Creek, DNR records show.

That wastewater has repeatedly violated limits for ammonia nitrogen, waste solids, oil and grease, and the DNR recently fined the company $8,000.

“They have violated pretty much every limit that’s in their permit,” said Kristi Burg, a senior environmental specialist for the DNR.

That has led the city to also violate the limits of the pollution it can discharge, and the department is in the process of taking enforcement action against Audubon, Burg said.

“It’s a capacity issue,” said Brian Juelsgaard, public works director for Audubon.

The city’s treatment plant has been unable to sufficiently eliminate the pollutants of the wastewater from the truck wash despite attempts by the truck stop operators to reduce the discharges, but “we have noticed an improvement,” Juelsgaard said.

However, the chief executive of Waspy’s, Brian Handlos, said the root of the problem is an engineer’s mistake, and that he has remedied the pollution issue in recent months.

“In one week we dropped all the contaminants by 90%,” he said. “There’s actually no problems.”

The mistake, he said, was a misplaced decimal point in a figure that was submitted to the DNR years ago, which led the department to believe the truck wash would be discharging about 10% of what it actually sends to the wastewater treatment plant.

Further, the truck stop has installed barriers to collect debris from the animal trailers that has been effective at reducing the pollution, Handlos said.

He plans to seek a new treatment agreement with the DNR that corrects the previous clerical mistake. It’s not yet clear whether the recent efforts to reduce pollutants will alleviate the excessive discharges from the city’s treatment plant.

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