For peat's sake, farmer opposes new pipeline

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is charged with protecting the nation’s aquatic resources. Earlier this month, it granted permission for Minnesota Pipe Line to cross 51 miles of wetlands and 188 waterways, as it builds a new oil pipeline.

And while the company has pages and pages of procedures for reducing its impact on the environment and farming, one local farm family believes something slipped through the cracks.

The VonBerges own 160 acres of farmland, near Plato, straddling the border of McLeod and Carver counties.

Ronald VonBerge believes the very thing that makes his land fertile could spell disaster. “We have a lot of peat ground on our property. It’s very high-nutrient soil ... It’s absorbent — and flammable.”

Peat forms from decayed vegetation in bogs. It creates a fine, spongy soil that eventually turns into coal, over millions of years. When it’s dry, it burns easily.

VonBerge recalls a time when his father had what he called “a senior moment” and burned a pile of seed bags on peat ground at the family farm. VonBerge spent most of a month putting out the smoldering fire. Although he’s a smoker, VonBerge would never even think about dropping a cigarette butt out in his field.

“There’s stories of peat fires burning for years,” he said.

That’s no exaggeration. Peat fires can potentially smolder for centuries. More than 100 continually burning peat fires in southeast Asia have been smoking for 10 years, releases vast clouds of gases visible by NASA’s orbiting satellites.

“Nobody has brought this point up,” Von Berge said. “Nobody seems to care, but it seems to be a major issue.”

Von Berge worries that sparks thrown by welding or other construction activities could potentially ruin his entire operation.

Peat precautions
California is considered by many to be ahead-of-the-curve in environmental regulation.

During a 1999 permitting process for a gas pipeline, built by Lodi Gas Storage, the state noted that part of the line would be buried in peat soils. The state’s environmental impact report noted “a slight possibility that pipeline joint preparation and welding of the pipeline may initiate a peat fire causing harmful air emissions and damage to property … If not extinguished immediately, a fire may grow to a size that can only effectively be controlled by flooding the land, which could have secondary effects on agricultural activities, such as crop loss or seed bed preparation that limits the potential crop yield.”

To find out how the state of California addressed those concerns, and what Minnesota Pipe Line plans to do, see the full story in the Aug. 28 Leader print edition.

(Jorge Sosa is a staff writer for the Hutchinson Leader. He can be reached at sosa@hutchinsonleader.com)