Cleanup workers are scooping up by hand waste oil that leaked into ponds at a closed Central Louisiana tire processing plant after it caught fire last month, environmental regulators said Friday.
Known as pyrolytic oil, the liquid oozed from tens of thousands of tires and tire chips that caught fire for 10 days in January, forcing the evacuation of 1,500 inmates from a nearby state prison, officials said.
The waste oil is just one of the unresolved cleanup questions left at the Cottonport Monofill site, where the fire was finally extinguished on Jan. 26.
Greg Langley, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Quality, said workers have collected about 500 barrels of the oil and expect to collect 300 more.
"They're out there today in the wind and the cold, and they're recovering the oil by hand," Langley said Friday.
Unlike crude oil, pyrolytic oil isn't easily sopped up with absorbent boom.
Recovered oil is being stored in tanks on the site. DEQ has taken steps to prevent remaining oil from running off and is testing an oil sample to judge whether it can be reused or must be disposed of, Langley said.
Other questions still awaiting answers are who will pay for the cleanup and what to do with the remaining tires, burned and unburned.
"We're trying to figure out a way to get them removed. It's just a question of figuring out the ownership and all that," he said.
Cottonport Monofill had been chopping up waste tires for reuse under a state tire recycling program — the chopped up bits are called monofill — but the company went bankrupt about seven years ago.
More than 100,000 whole tires plus large mounds of monofill were at the complex early last year, according to a DEQ report.
The site has a complex ownership situation, making it hard to determine who must foot the bill for the cleanup.
Several parcels of the company's land were sold in a sheriff's sale in June 2020 for unpaid taxes, parish land records show.
Avoyelles Parish government is listed as the owner of the main processing site, where unprocessed tires, monofill and the oil-contaminated ponds are located, according to parish tax assessment records and aerial photographs.
Some of the unprocessed tires are also stacked on a privately held parcel next door.
Parish officials have argued that sheriff's sale hasn't been fully adjudicated yet, so the land and the cleanup associated with it aren't the parish's responsibility. In an old report, DEQ suggested a bank that had a loan with Cottonport Monofill was "in possession" of the company's facility and assets, but bank officials now dispute that claim.
Meanwhile, DEQ officials are not planning to recover monofill that a marsh buggy pushed into one of the ponds to extinguish the tire chips, but Langley said that could change if it's reusable.