Authorities discover catastrophe waiting to happen along critical waterway: 'One never knows when it's going to happen'

Oregon officials and conservationists fear a farmland dump pit could fail any day and that it could have a dangerous impact on a local creek.

The dump site in question is on a farm in Aurora, Oregon, about 20 miles outside of Portland. The Statesman Journal reported that the site's owner charges companies to dump their industrial vacuum waste into the pit. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality says the pit is full of liquid and could soon fail, which would send large amounts of waste, soil, and sediment into Ryan Creek.

Friends of French Prairie, a group that promotes sustainable farming in the region, has voiced concern about the site — and another one, built and operated by the same company in neighboring Hubbard — for more than a year.

Although neighbors told the Statesman Journal the pits don't have proper permits, the property owners say they are legal because they are filling in low-lying land to use it for agricultural purposes.

Local law enforcement disagrees, however.

The Marion County Sheriff's Office sent the owners a notice in March that said they can't operate a commercial business on the farmland and that they must stop using the dump pit. The DEQ, meanwhile, also sent notice in March that said the pit must be properly reconstructed or removed entirely.

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But locals fear the action may have been taken too late.

"The trouble with failure of this nature is one never knows when it's going to happen," Friends of French Prairie board president Ben Williams told the Statesman Journal. "The risk of failure grows over time because the dam is un-engineered and not built to normal specifications."

Sadly, waterways across the globe have been poisoned by illegal dumping. Such actions have caused toxic algae to kill fish in Texas and the United Kingdom, and plastic pollution is one of the biggest problems facing oceans and other bodies of water.

The Natural Resources Defense Council notes that unsafe water kills more people each year than all types of violence combined. And when only 1% of the Earth's freshwater is accessible by humans, any act of water pollution can be devastating to a local ecosystem.