Four drums of jet fuel found tucked away inside a crack in a rock face near Jeffrey City, Wyoming, will cost taxpayers more than $35,000 to clean up.
“That was an amazing site, because it was just stuck into these rocks, which are kind of like the formations at Vedauwoo,” Bureau of Land Management’s Kellen Waldo told Cowboy State Daily. “And it was surprising how the field agents even came across it.”
The jet fuel had clearly been tucked away so as to hide from view, and that raised all sorts of questions. Who had hidden this jet fuel and why? And how long ago had these drums of fuel been hidden?
The jet fuel dump is part of a growing problem federal and state officials are dealing with across the Cowboy State. Rusting appliances, hulking sofas, chemicals, industrial metals, and other objects difficult to throw away are getting stashed in some of Wyoming’s most rural outposts, posing environmental and health hazards — not to mention visual pollution in some of the Cowboy State’s pristine areas.
There were no answers as to where the jet fuel came from, unfortunately. But there was one important question that was easily answered.
“Luckily, the drums were not leaking underneath,” Waldo said. “So we didn’t have any more environmental issues with it. A contract went out to sample it, take care of it, and dispose of it.”
The drums are among the odder things Bureau of Land Management has found in illegal dumping sites dotted across the Cowboy State. — but not necessarily the worst. At least, in that particular case, there was no environmental contamination to contend with.
That’s not always the case, though. Like the time thieves procured some pumping wire from a big oilfield site and then burned the rubber casing off the metal to sell the remaining copper on BLM property. That left the soil contaminated with water-soluble oxidized lead.
“These are 1,000-foot cables,” Waldo said. “And so, they took them out just west of Kirby on the Gebo site, a historical mining area up there for coal.”
That took thousands of dollars to remediate, Waldo said.
“We had three or four remediation events, where we had to go up there and actually dig up the soil and take it to a facility in Salt Lake for treatment at an EPA-approved facility,” he said. “It was not a good situation.”
Illegal dumping is a long-standing problem, Waldo said, one that’s been hard to curtail.
This year alone, his office plans to clear nearly two dozen different dumps — most of them habitual. They contain all manner of rubbish, from appliances, furniture, yard waste and bullet casings to abandoned cars, boats, and other unwanted debris from the modern world. The trash will lie hidden in remote ditches, rusting or molding away, forgotten, alongside otherwise pristine trees and prairie grass.
The BLM’s list of places to clean up this year is roughly three times the number of sites cleaned up last year, but that’s due to better outreach and education, Waldo said. More success in getting field offices to report illegal dumping sites.
That’s important, Waldo added, because if the dumps sit for too long, they can become archeological sites. In those cases, a state archaeologist is called in to review the site and determine if it’s “culturally significant.”
“We have some sites like that up by Basin and Greybull,” Waldo said. “And there’s another southwest of Kaycee. We can’t clean those up, but if people add new stuff to them, like more contemporary stuff, we can go in there and clean that stuff up.”
Wyoming’s most remote spaces have become sites of illegal dumping, everything from jet fuel and burned rubber to copper wiring and appliances, cars and boats. It’s costing taxpayers thousands of dollars to clean up. (Kellen Waldo, BLM Wyoming) 
Wyoming’s most remote spaces have become sites of illegal dumping, everything from jet fuel and burned rubber to copper wiring and appliances, cars and boats. It’s costing taxpayers thousands of dollars to clean up. (Bureau of Land Management Wyoming) 
Wyoming’s most remote spaces have become sites of illegal dumping, everything from jet fuel and burned rubber to copper wiring and appliances, cars and boats. It’s costing taxpayers thousands of dollars to clean up. (Kellen Waldo, BLM Wyoming) 
Wyoming’s most remote spaces have become sites of illegal dumping, everything from jet fuel and burned rubber to copper wiring and appliances, cars and boats. It’s costing taxpayers thousands of dollars to clean up. (Bureau of Land Management Wyoming)
A Growing Problem
The Bureau of Land Management isn’t the only agency facing a tidal wave of refuse that’s being illegally dumped in remote spaces of Wyoming. The Wyoming Department of Transportation is also on the front lines of this disturbing trend as well. Although the amount of refuse isn’t tracked, WYDOT spokesman Cody Beers told Cowboy State Daily the volume is rising.
“It’s a problem all across Wyoming,” WYDOT spokesman Cody Beers told Cowboy State Daily. “Whether it’s laziness or the fact that people don’t want to pay (landfill) fees, it’s become a bigger and bigger problem as we have fewer and fewer landfills.”
One problem, Beers said, is the remoteness of sites where things are dumped. In fact, sometimes the sites are not found for years, because they are hidden in ditches and not readily visible. That also means there are few if any witnesses to the crime.
Even then, the chances of catching people and prosecuting the culprits of illegal dumps is relatively low, Beers said.
“Our law enforcement agencies are already so busy that it’s pretty hard to be proactive with that,” he said.
Occasionally, if illegally dumped material causes a big environmental cleanup, law enforcement will try to find the culprits using discarded receipts or other identifying materials that accompanies the trash.
But, for the most part, what happens is an endless recruitment of volunteers to help clean up these recurring, illegal dumping sites.
Dumping On A Road To Nowhere
A perennial favorite in Fremont County is Gas Hills Road, east of Riverton, where there is so much trash, it’s just become part of the ordinary landscape.
“Gas Hills is just bizarre,” Beers said. “I mean the filth. And you’ll find weird stuff out there, like a plastic baby doll’s head. You know, just the head of Baby Alive laying there.”
The Gas Hills site is popular, Beers said, because it’s essentially a highway to nowhere.
“Highway 136 is a dead-end road from Riverton the Gas Hills,” Beers said. “And it used to be a heavily used road back in the uranium days. A bunch of reclaimed uranium miles are out at the end of that road, which is now just a road that goes nowhere.”
There are three ranches and a lot of public land, Beers said, with very low traffic volumes, making witnesses to the crime unlikely. Wyoming’s fines for littering ranges from $750 with an up to six-month jail sentence to an up to $1,000 fine and nine-month jail sentence for littering with bodily fluids on the rights of way of a highway.
“People find it easier to drive out along a highway like that and throw their trash out there,” Beers said. “And we’ve got a lot of roads like that in Wyoming, whether they’re state or county roads or forest service roads or BLM roads. Those seem to be the roads where a lot of this illegal dumping takes place.”
Around 6 tons of refuse were removed from the Gas Hills site a couple of years ago. That waste included household appliances, furniture, and other refuse and debris.
“It’s a huge challenge from a law enforcement perspective,” Beers said. “We do a lot of education to try to encourage people not to do it, and we put out news releases about it. But unfortunately, it still happens.”
Never A Shortage Of Trash
Spring and summer are the time of year that Beers said WYDOT goes after the problem, to the extent it can. That gives the snowplow drivers some extra work to do, Beers said — not that there aren’t other tasks they could do instead if trash somehow magically disappeared.
“Our guys have picked up dirty diapers,” he said. “People have dumped meth labs, syringes, and drug paraphernalia.”
There have also been gallon milk jugs full of a certain yellow liquid.
“I’m not gonna say it’s just truckers,” Beers said. “That’s kind of the cliche. But other people do that as well.”
Bureau of Land Management, too, plans to get going with its 20 or so sites in about the same time frame.
Their list of dumps includes an assortment . Three habitual dumps northeast of Torrington on a larger parcel of BLM land with discarded appliances, furniture, yard waste and metal debris.
A habitual site south of Laramie with target shooting trash, wood refuse, carcasses, pallets, appliances. Some of these things were brought by recreational shooters as targets, and then left behind instead of being taken back out.
Construction debris at the Blairtown Connector site in Rock Springs, which often includes an abandoned car or boat as a bonus.
Worland’s Spring Creek Trash site, meanwhile, has construction debris from what appears to be an old cabin demolition, while MC Peaks near Cody has homemade target shooting benches, pallets, and general refuse.
Each of the 20 or so dumps will cost a minimum of $5,000 to $7,000 to clean up, Waldo said, while those with hazardous materials can easily end up costing six figures.
In all, Waldo estimates the sites BLM is cleaning up this year will take more than $150,000. Assuming no environmental hazards are found.
Many other cleanup efforts across the state are all volunteer, with no funding to support them, making it difficult to truly count the cost of illegal dumping. The amount of refuse collected this wayis not weighed or tracked either, Beers said.
The problem is so bad in Fremont County that the Sheriff has begun a program where inmates are taken out to help pick up the seemingly endless supply of discarded refuse.
“Wind River Reservation, every year on Earth Day spends a good two weeks picking up trash and cleaning up the highways on and around the reservation,” Beers said. “High School classes help pick up trash, service groups help pick up trash. There’s never a shortage of trash to pick up.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
