In a Push to Connect Rural California, Broadband Drilling Fouled Southern Humboldt’s Waterways

On the evening of June 2, a Southern Humboldt resident looked at Redwood Creek from the Seely Creek Road crossing and knew something was wrong. The water was white — not muddy the way it gets after rain, but opaque, for miles.

The resident called the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Within an hour, two water board engineers were driving Briceland Road west of Redway, stopping at bridges and turnouts, watching the plume move downstream through the canyon. Wide-spread cloudy water, clay particles in suspension. They followed it upstream until they found where it was coming from: a ditch draining from a private property on Briceland Road, running into an unnamed tributary, pouring into Redwood Creek.

By Wednesday evening, June 4, the plume had reached the South Fork Eel River.

What happened next revealed something bigger than a single spill on a rural creek. The white water running through Southern Humboldt was connected to one of the largest infrastructure investments California has ever made — a $3.25 billion effort to bring high-speed internet to communities that have gone without it for years. And at the end of a long chain of contractors and subcontractors, someone had apparently been dumping thousands of gallons of drilling waste on private land, with apparently not enough planning for where it would go.

What Broadband for All Is

In 2021, California passed Senate Bill 156, committing $3.25 billion to build a middle-mile fiber optic network stretching 10,000 miles across the state. The idea was to lay the backbone, the underground cables that carry internet traffic long distances, so that local providers could eventually connect homes and businesses in communities that have been cut off from reliable broadband for decades. Southern Humboldt is one of those places.

The California Department of Technology runs the program, with GoldenStateNet, a nonprofit, serving as its third-party administrator. To build faster and cheaper, the state partnered with private companies. One of those partners is Arcadian Infracom, a fiber infrastructure company based in St. Louis, Missouri. Arcadian holds contracts for more than 1,250 route miles of new fiber in California, including a route running from the Bay Area to Eureka along Highway 101 — the Redwood Route.

That route runs straight through Southern Humboldt.

To build it, Arcadian brought in North Sky Communications, which hired Direct Drilling, a horizontal directional drilling company based in Oregon, to bore the underground tunnels that the fiber conduit runs through.

How Drilling Works…and What It Leaves Behind

Horizontal directional drilling is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of digging a trench, crews use a drill that bores underground at an angle, threading conduit beneath roads, rivers, and other obstacles without breaking the surface. It is less disruptive than open trenching, and it is the standard method for running utilities through sensitive terrain.

The catch is the fluid.

To drill underground, crews pump a mixture of water and bentonite clay — a fine, powdery mineral — through the drill to lubricate the bit and carry rock cuttings back to the surface. That return mixture, called drilling mud or slurry, comes back out laden with whatever was underground: soil, sand, rock fragments, and the bentonite itself. On an active job, a crew can generate thousands of gallons of it every day.

That slurry has to go somewhere.

The week of May 25, Direct Drilling started work near Garberville, drilling Monday through Thursday. According to workers interviewed by California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the drilling crew was using two products: Tru-Bore, a bentonite powder mixed four 50-pound sacks to every 1,000 gallons of water, and sometimes Super Gel-X, another bentonite-based drilling fluid. They captured the return slurry in 800-gallon tanks on trailers. They were doing ten loads a day.

That is 8,000 gallons of drilling slurry every day they worked.

Where It Went

According to the water board, a property owner on Briceland Road made an arrangement with the drilling company to accept the slurry on his land. CDFW confirmed that during the first week of drilling, the week of May 25, Direct Drilling was hauling all of it there.

The property has an onstream pond with a liner. The spillway runs over the berm, down through willows, across an earthen ford, along a roadside ditch on Briceland Road, and into an unnamed Class II tributary that drains to Redwood Creek. Water board engineer Adona White, who inspected the property and creek on June 2 and again on June 4, documented two inches of clay deposits in the ditch. The first pool downstream of the culvert, she wrote, likely had substantial deposits in it. Rocks further downstream were visibly coated.

At some point, the water board believes around June 1, Direct Drilling switched to a second site: an excavated pit at the Meadows Business Park on Evergreen Road in Redway. CDFW Game Warden Shane Embry visited that site and photographed it. The pit was full of gray slurry. Tru-Bore sacks were stacked nearby.

Neither site had a permit.

“We do not have anyone on record as having a permit for the disposal of drill-related waste,” Adona White, supervising water resource control engineer for the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, said. The agency’s jurisdiction covers the Russian River north to the Oregon border, the entire North Coast region.

Where a contractor would legally take it is an open question — one not addressed anywhere in the publicly available documents for this project. The nearest facility believed to accept the material appears to be well outside the North Coast, adding significantly to the cost of legal disposal.

Exempt on Paper, But With Conditions

The Arcadian project received a CEQA Notice of Exemption from Caltrans District 1 on April 8, 2026 — eight weeks before the Redwood Creek discharge. The exemption, signed by Caltrans Senior Environmental Scientist Cassie Nichols, invoked Section 21080.51 of the Public Resources Code, a statutory exemption created by SB 156 for linear broadband projects in public rights-of-way. The document stated the project “would not cause a significant impact to the environment.”

Under that law, a broadband project can skip environmental review entirely — no impact study, no public comment period — if it meets four conditions: the work stays within 30 feet of a public road; the ground is restored to its original condition after installation; the project includes monitors during construction and measures to protect biological resources; and the contractor agrees to comply with state and federal environmental law, including the California Endangered Species Act.

The Arcadian project qualified on all four counts, at least on paper. That is how the exemption works…it is granted based on commitments made before a shovel hits the ground.

Two of those commitments are now directly relevant. The law required measures to protect biological resources during construction. It required compliance with the California Endangered Species Act, which covers coho salmon and steelhead, both present in Redwood Creek and the South Fork Eel River. Those protections were the basis for bypassing environmental review. What investigators are now examining is whether the drilling waste disposal practices that followed were consistent with those commitments.

A review of the project’s stormwater compliance documents filed with the state’s SMARTS permitting portal found no plan addressing how drilling slurry would be managed or disposed of during construction. Horizontal directional drilling is a water-intensive process — it cannot be done without generating liquid waste.

Caltrans’ own encroachment permit guidelines, updated in July 2025, are explicit: any broadband project installing linear underground conduit, which is exactly what this project is, requires a Construction General Permit regardless of how much soil is disturbed. That permit requires a site-specific plan spelling out how stormwater and waste will be managed, prepared by a qualified developer before construction begins. The guidelines state that construction cannot begin before that permit coverage is in place.

Whether the project was in full compliance with Caltrans’ own permit requirements at the time drilling began is a question the documents raise but do not answer. Caltrans has been made aware of the incident and is investigating. Redheaded Blackbelt submitted a public records request to Caltrans for construction plan documents prior to publication. Those records had not been provided at the time this story was published.

What It Does to a Creek

Bentonite is not toxic in the way a chemical spill is, and the water board said it is not aware of any threats to drinking water from the discharge. But non-toxic does not mean harmless…and what else the slurry may contain is still an open question. As a drill bores through soil and rock, the return fluid picks up whatever is underground. What minerals, metals, or other materials the geology along this stretch of Highway 101 may have contributed to the mix has not yet been determined. The water board said testing to further characterize the material is underway.

What bentonite alone does to a living creek is well documented. When suspended clay enters cold, clear water in fine particles, it clouds the water column. Fish cannot see to feed. Their gills work harder. The milky-white appearance, distinct from ordinary muddy runoff, is what caught the attention of the first resident who called it in, and what allowed water board engineers to trace the plume upstream to its source.

When the clay settles, it fills the spaces between gravel and rocks where aquatic insects live and where salmon and steelhead lay their eggs, coating the streambed in a layer of paste. Fisheries biologist Patrick Higgins of the Eel River Recovery Project told KMUD News the discharge is not consistent with the water board’s Basin Plan, which protects cold water habitat and fish.

Redwood Creek and the South Fork of the Eel River are among the most closely watched and carefully tended salmon and steelhead streams on California’s North Coast, and the public has spent years and significant money working to restore salmon and steelhead runs that have dropped sharply from their historic numbers.

Since 2012, the Salmonid Restoration Federation has been engaged in community outreach and low-flow monitoring in Redwood Creek, which has historically provided important rearing habitat for threatened coho salmon. With funding from the Wildlife Conservation Board and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, SRF and Stillwater Sciences built a flow augmentation project on the Marshall Ranch that began releasing water into Redwood Creek in 2023 — 10 million gallons of stored water dedicated to keeping the creek cool and flowing for salmon during the critical dry season.

Humboldt County committed $1.1 million in a legal settlement with Friends of the Eel River specifically to fund culvert replacements and road repairs in the Redwood Creek and Sprowel Creek watersheds, with conservationists citing declining coho populations as the driving concern. The Northcoast Regional Land Trust received $1.5 million to acquire a conservation easement over 895 acres encompassing most of the headwaters of the Redwood Creek watershed, which drains directly to the South Fork of the Eel River and contains critical habitat for threatened steelhead, coho, and Chinook salmon.

NOAA Fisheries has identified the South Fork of the Eel River as a priority watershed, with a dedicated action plan targeting recovery of coho salmon, steelhead, and Chinook salmon. The South Fork Eel already carries a state and federal impairment listing for sediment, meaning it was already considered too dirty with fine particles under water quality law before a drop of bentonite slurry entered the watershed.

June is an active period for juvenile fish in the system. The damage to the insects and streambed organisms that fish depend on for food can persist until winter flows are strong enough to flush the gravel clean.

Who Was Watching — and Who Was Responsible

The discharge was reported June 2. The water board and CDFW were investigating by that evening. But the question of who in the project’s chain of command knew what was happening — and when — goes well beyond which county agency got a phone call.

Recall what the CEQA exemption required: monitors during construction and measures to protect biological resources. Those were the conditions under which the project was allowed to skip environmental review. Whether anyone was actually monitoring the drilling operation, the slurry it generated, or where that slurry was going is a question none of the companies involved have answered.

When Redheaded Blackbelt reached a North Sky Communications representative, she said she had learned of the incident moments before the call and could not speak to it. A follow-up email to North Sky has not been answered. Arcadian Infracom did not respond to an email seeking comment. Direct Drilling’s Oregon office did not respond to phone call requests for comment.

What is known is that the arrangement to dump slurry on private land did not appear to be limited to the Briceland Road property. A source told Redheaded Blackbelt that they were approached by representatives of the drilling operation and asked to accept four to five loads of slurry per day on their Redway-area property — each load roughly 1,600 gallons. They turned it down. The source said they were told the company had all the necessary permits to dispose of the material that way. The water board confirmed no such permits exist anywhere in the North Coast region.

How an out-of-state drilling company found at least one (but maybe more) rural Southern Humboldt landowner willing to accept drilling waste, and what they were told about the legality of the arrangement, is part of what investigators are trying to determine. According to White, Embry interviewed Direct Drilling workers near Garberville on June 4. Embry reported workers told him the company was doing ten loads a day of 800-gallon tanks during the week of May 25, all of it going to the Briceland Road property. Around June 1 they switched to an excavated pit at the Meadows Business Park on Evergreen Road in Redway.

Whether this was a decision made by a crew on the ground, or whether someone higher in the contractor chain knew slurry was being disposed of on private land without permits, has not been established.

The June 4 site visit at the Briceland Road property was attended by water board and CDFW personnel along with the property owner and his attorney, who limited what investigators could access. The site had already been modified before they arrived.

Water board engineer White directed the property owner to hire a qualified professional to conduct an impacts assessment and develop a cleanup and mitigation plan. Any work in or near the stream requires preauthorization from the water board and CDFW. Cleanup efforts began the same day to remove settled sludge from the margins of the tributary watercourse.

Who bears financial responsibility for that cleanup — the property owner, Direct Drilling, North Sky, Arcadian, or some combination — has not been determined. The water board’s enforcement investigation is ongoing.

The water board said it believes there may be additional disposal sites beyond the two already identified.

Though Humboldt County Department of Environmental Health was notified of the initial spill report, the County Director of Planning and Building, John Ford, was not notified until midday Monday, June 8 — six days after the discharge was first reported. In an interview with Redheaded Blackbelt, Ford said the county “is currently discussing the situation with the contractor. The county is investigating what violations may have occurred under its own codes.

A Bigger Question

Arcadian Infracom holds contracts on multiple legs of the Broadband for All buildout, covering more than 1,250 route miles across California, from Southern California to the Oregon border. The company’s California work is expected to continue through December 2026.

On this single segment near Garberville, Direct Drilling was generating a reported 8,000 gallons of drilling slurry every day it worked. Over a single week, that is 32,000 gallons — from roughly one to one and a half miles of drilling. The Arcadian Redwood Route alone runs from the Bay Area to Eureka. Arcadian’s California contracts span hundreds of additional miles beyond that, through terrain that includes rivers, creeks, and watersheds up and down the state.

The math is not complicated. Horizontal directional drilling produces slurry everywhere it operates. Every mile of fiber conduit bored underground on this project, and every other project like it, generates waste that has to go somewhere. On this segment, investigators say it went to private land without permits. Whether that practice is isolated to this crew, this segment, or this company is not known.

What Happens Now

The water board says the Briceland Road property is no longer discharging into the creek, but settled material already in the streambed may continue to cause cloudiness as it moves through the system. With additional disposal sites believed to exist, whether other sources remain active is part of the ongoing investigation by the water board, CDFW, and Humboldt County.

Redheaded Blackbelt will update this story as the investigation continues.

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Earlier: Drilling Slurry Believed Source of White Plume in Redwood Creek; Agencies Investigating

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Lisa Music is a reporter for Redheaded Blackbelt, which covers Humboldt County and the North Coast at kymkemp.com.