Feds seek to restore Nishnabotna River after Iowa fertilizer spill

Iowa's largest farmers cooperative might face a significant fine from the U.S. Department of the Interior for a massive fertilizer spill earlier this year in Southwest Iowa that annihilated aquatic creatures in a 60-mile stretch of a river.

The agency has launched a Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration investigation into the 267,000-gallon spill last March at a NEW Cooperative site in Red Oak that contaminated the East Nishnabotna River.

It's an extraordinary measure meant to address environmental catastrophes and can result in significant fines for habitat restorations. The process can take years.

In 2021, for example, Canadian Pacific Railway agreed to pay about $282,000 for a train derailment six years earlier that plunged three rail cars and about 55,000 gallons of ethanol into the Mississippi River north of Dubuque, according to the Department of the Interior.

It happened in an area with a robust mussel population, including the endangered Higgins eye pearlymussel. Mussels of more than two dozen species were killed by the derailment and cleanup. That fine will fund mussel restocking, bank restoration and dredging to improve an area where fish dwell during winters that likely was affected by the ethanol.

It's unclear how long it might take to form a restoration plan for the Nishnabotna. The nitrogen fertilizer killed nearly 800,000 fish in Iowa and Missouri before it reached the Missouri River and was diluted. There were also numerous dead frogs, mussels and snakes.

"The assessment is still in progress," said Edward Karecki, an environmental contaminants specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a bureau of the Department of Interior that is handling the inquiry. He declined to comment further.

Other Iowa incidents

The federal department has reached settlements for five other environmental contaminations in Iowa in the past three decades. Many of the settlements also involved the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Elsewhere, the settlements have been much larger. In 2016, BP agreed to pay $20.8 billion for the "worst environmental disaster in our nation's history," the Interior Department said. That was the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which released about 134 million gallons of oil.

The East Nish

The spill in Red Oak happened between March 9 and 11.

NEW Cooperative employees had attempted without success to ready a large tank of urea ammonium nitrate for farmers preparing their fields for the growing season. The fertilizer had partially crystallized during the cold winter months.

The fertilizer normally flows through a distribution line to a filling area, where an employee inadvertently left open a valve before the weekend. Nothing was flowing at first because of the crystallization.

But warmer temperatures are believed to have unblocked the line and allowed about 267,000 gallons of the fertilizer to escape while no one was at the site. It went over land and through a stormwater drain to a ditch that empties into the East Nishnabotna River.

Fertilizer spills often kill fish when microbes consume the nutrients and deplete oxygen in the water, but the Red Oak spill was substantial enough to kill the fish and other creatures directly. The plume retained its potent toxicity even after the river joined with the West Nishnabotna near the state's southern border and killed fish for another 10 miles in Missouri.

Co-op employees discovered the spill about 5:30 a.m. at the start of the work week.

"Upon discovery of the spill, management immediately initiated containment protocols as per our established safety procedures," NEW Cooperative said at the time. "We promptly notified the appropriate local authorities and regulatory agencies and have been working diligently in close cooperation with them ever since.”

The cooperative has declined to comment about the matter since, including about whether the tank had a leak-detection system. It made a soil barrier between the ditch and the river to halt its contamination.

The cooperative pumped more than 200,000 gallons of contaminated water from the site and removed about 1,600 tons of contaminated soil, which were spread on fields in the area. The work took months.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has asked the Iowa Attorney General’s Office to litigate the matter because its administrative fines are capped at $10,000. The Attorney General’s Office has declined to comment about what larger penalty NEW Cooperative might face.

The cooperative’s financial losses so far are unclear. The fertilizer alone was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and cleanups can be expensive.

In December 2023, NEW Cooperative hired a company to remediate a dry fertilizer and diesel fuel spill that happened when one of its tractors collapsed a private bridge over the Tarkio River near Stanton, a neighboring town of Red Oak.

The company, Gohlinghorst Excavation, billed the co-op about $4 million, according to court records. NEW Cooperative has not paid and is disputing the amount in court.

Comments: (319) 368-8541; jared.strong@thegazette.com