{"id":25270,"date":"2016-12-09T09:03:09","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T17:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/state-regulators-look-to-update-petroleum-cleanup-guidelines\/"},"modified":"2016-12-09T09:03:09","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T17:03:09","slug":"state-regulators-look-to-update-petroleum-cleanup-guidelines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/state-regulators-look-to-update-petroleum-cleanup-guidelines\/","title":{"rendered":"State regulators look to update petroleum cleanup guidelines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>JUNEAU \u2014<\/strong> Alaska officials are working to revise decades-old protocols to be used in the event of petroleum-based spills.<\/p>\n<p>The state\u2019s Department of Environmental Conservation met in November to discuss an overhaul of the agency\u2019s regulations for cleaning up petroleum spills, KTOO-FM reported. The department is taking public comments on the issue until mid-January.<\/p>\n<p>Sally Schlichting, who handles policy and regulation for contaminated sites for the DEC, said the update is long overdue. The last time petroleum guidelines were updated was in 1999.<\/p>\n<p>Schlichting said her department wants to update the cleanup levels to reflect more current science on the toxicity of petroleum.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor example, in our groundwater, our cleanup levels, in the past, had not accounted for the risks to children from consuming and being in contact with that groundwater that\u2019s contaminated,\u201d Schlichting said.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not clear what the new regulations will look like, but Schlichting said it\u2019s likely that the cleanup levels for some things, like diesel and gasoline, will probably become more stringent.<\/p>\n<p>At least one Palmer resident plans to comment. Ralph Hulbert said in the past he\u2019s clashed with state regulators because their complex calculations required for petroleum cleanup in soil and groundwater don\u2019t factor in what it takes to respond to a spill.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey do not like to consider the risks of these responses and what you have to do to clean it up,\u201d Hulbert said.<\/p>\n<p>Hulbert said some of the cleanup methods cause risks that are worse than what a spill could ever have caused. He said he also doesn\u2019t think the state does enough to ensure that cleanup costs are reasonable for homeowners and companies responsible for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>JUNEAU \u2014 Alaska officials are working to revise decades-old protocols to be used in the event of petroleum-based spills. The state\u2019s Department of Environmental Conservation met in November to discuss an overhaul of the agency\u2019s regulations for cleaning up petroleum spills, KTOO-FM reported. The department is taking public comments on the issue until mid-January. Sally [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-25270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25270"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=25270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}