Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008

Roadkill added to list of Oregon's reusable resources

By Franny White, Herald staff writer

HEPPNER -- Deer hit by cars here soon won't go to waste.

Sometime next year, Oregon's Morrow County will be the latest community to have a compost facility for roadkill carcasses. The Morrow County Planning Commission unanimously approved a conditional use permit this week for the Oregon Department of Transportation-run facility at an old quarry on state Highway 74 between Heppner and Lexington.

And it's not alone. Oregon took its cue from Washington, which got the idea from Montana, whose leaders heard about it from New York. Across the country, officials are re-examining the way they dispose of roadkill.

Animal remains on roadways pose a threat to drivers and people's health, said Jeff Moore, who's organizing Oregon's carcass composting efforts for the DOT.

And traditional methods used to discard carcasses are no longer ideal. There are fewer rendering plants and ground water contamination concerns make the old standby -- simply burying remains in the ground -- less desirable.

"We're trying to be proactive and manage this stuff better than it has been in the past," Moore said.

Composting is a viable option, Moore says, but the idea can make some queasy.

"At first, I was like 'Oh my gosh,' " recalled Abbi Russell, spokeswoman for the Washington Department of Transportation in Goldendale, one of the state's hot spots for car-killed deer.

Washington has two composting facilities --the first was built north of Spokane in 2006, the other outside Goldendale early last year. Both sites also have taken elk and bear in addition to deer.

The practice may seem odd, but Russell said composting carcasses is a practical, green option. Washington transportation crews used to just take road kill to landfills or bury them along the road.

But the Goldendale office is 50 miles away from the nearest landfill and some roadsides don't have enough space to bury the animals, she said. Now crews can choose between traditional disposal or composting, which can save on transportation costs and free employees to spend more time maintaining roads, she said.

And with 3,331 deer alone killed on Washington's state highways last year, there's plenty of composting to be done.

The compost doesn't stink, either, said Jay Chambers, a maintenance supervisor at the Goldendale office.

"It just smells like musty dirt," he said. "It doesn't have a dramatic effect."

The compost bins' construction is pretty simple: Concrete barriers form a 20-by-20-foot box over an asphalt floor. Crews line the asphalt with a foot of previously-made compost. A layer of about 10 deer is then placed on top. Each layer is covered with six inches of green material, like fresh wood chips or leaves.

When the 6-foot-tall bin is full, another layer of material is laid down as a cap. After 30 days, the contents are turned with a front-end loader.

"In the first 30 days, a lot of the moisture has been soaked up," Chambers said. "It's not a soupy mess like you'd imagine."

Piles do need to maintain a 60 percent moisture level, however. The intense heat of decomposition puts the piles at risk for combustion, Russell said.

Most of the animal already is broken up after 30 days, with the exception of a few bones and residual fur.

The bin sits for another month and is then unloaded onto the ground. Thirty more days pass to ensure all pathogens are gone. The compost is ready for use after 90 days.

"It's great compost," Chambers said. "It's just like what you buy in the store."

Washington plans to use its compost as ground cover on the sides of roads where native vegetation is being planted. But hundreds of cubic yards of material placed into the Goldendale's bins last year only created 50 cubic yards of compost. Chambers is waiting to make more before using the stuff.

That small output led West Virginia to limit its roadkill composting. That state spent $2.6 million since 2005 to produce a few truckloads of compost, the Charleston Daily Mail reported last month. Instead of hauling all road kill for composting, West Virginia lets nature take its course at rural sites.

Casey Arbogast doesn't know how he'll use the compost made at the Morrow County site. He's just happy his crews at the Heppner office of the state transportation department will have a sanitary place to put dead deer. That's particularly important near Morrow County's wheat and alfalfa fields, where deer flock to graze and are killed on nearby highways a couple times a week.

"It can be an awesome way of disposing carcasses ... and, for a lack of a better word, protecting people's noses," said Arbogast, a coordinator at the Heppner office.

The Morrow County composting facility will be Oregon's first. Moore hopes to have the Heppner operation running by next spring, sometime after the state Department of Environmental Quality is expected to grant a composting permit.

Chambers, of the Goldendale facility, is convinced more deer composting sites will be popping up throughout the nation.

"This is the way of the future," he said. "You don't have to dig any holes (and) when you're all done, you've got something you can use."