Drilling Halted in Southern Humboldt Over Slurry Disposal; County Demands Plan Before Work Resumes

Stock photo featuring Stop Work Order photo by Daniel X. O’Neil, cropped, blurred, and rotated. Background photo taken by CDFW.

Humboldt County has issued a stop work order halting horizontal directional drilling operations in Southern Humboldt connected to California’s Broadband for All fiber optic project after investigations revealed the contractor has nowhere to legally put the waste its equipment generates at this time.

The order followed the discovery that drilling slurry from the project had discharged into Redwood Creek and reached the South Fork of the Eel River, and that the waste had been dumped without permits on at least two private properties in the Redway area.

Director of Planning and Building John Ford said the stop work order was issued after the party responsible for a storage yard at the Meadows Business Park in Redway withdrew permission for the unpermited site to be used as a dump for the drilling slurry. Ford said representatives from Caltrans and Arcadian Infracom were present at the yard.

A John Deere mini excavator sits beside an excavated slurry pit at the Meadows Business Park in Redway, where drilling waste from the Broadband for All fiber optic project was being dumped without a permit. Photo: California Department of Fish and Wildlife, June 3, 2026.

What is clear is that neither the Evergreen Road site nor the earlier Briceland Road property had any permit for slurry disposal. Under Humboldt County’s grading ordinance, any earthwork exceeding 50 cubic yards requires a grading plan and permit. Digging a pit large enough to hold thousands of gallons of liquid waste would almost certainly exceed that threshold — and that’s before addressing whether such a pit could be permitted for liquid waste disposal at all.

The stop work order will not be lifted until the contractor provides the county with a legal path forward.

“They need to give us a plan for disposal of bentonite-related slurry in a way that is safe and doesn’t pollute the land or surface waters,” Ford said.

How It Came to Light

The problem only surfaced because a Southern Humboldt resident noticed Redwood Creek had turned white on the evening of June 2 and called the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. Engineers traced the plume upstream to a ditch draining from the Briceland Road property, where a pond liner had overflowed into an unnamed tributary. By June 4, the plume had reached the South Fork of the Eel River.

Ford noted that similar Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) work has been underway elsewhere in the county — along Highway 299, Old Arcata Road, and Highway 255 — without reported problems. But no reported problems is not the same as no problems. No one knew slurry was being dumped without permits in Southern Humboldt until it turned a creek white.

Whether other segments of this project, or other HDD projects operating in the region, have been handling their slurry legally is not known. The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board confirmed it has no permit on file for slurry disposal anywhere in its jurisdiction — which runs from the Oregon border south to Santa Rosa — for any project. Not one.

The Scale of What’s Underway

Governor Gavin Newsom has called Broadband for All a cornerstone of his administration’s equity agenda. “We’re working in real-time to realize our bold vision of ensuring all Californians have access to high-speed internet, no matter where they come from or how much they make,” Newsom said at a 2024 groundbreaking. “The Middle Mile Broadband Network is about more than technology — we’re connecting local communities that have for too long been left off the digital map.”

That vision comes with an enormous physical footprint. According to the California Department of Technology’s 2026 Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative legislative report, Humboldt County alone has 252.7 miles of broadband network planned or actively under installation, with 120 miles in active installation as of late 2025. Arcadian Infracom holds a contract for 1,011.9 route miles statewide. The full program spans more than 8,100 miles across every county in California, backed by a $3.8 billion budget.

Every mile of fiber conduit bored underground produces slurry. On this single segment near Garberville, Direct Drilling was generating a reported 8,000 gallons a day. Across thousands of miles of active construction statewide, slurry disposal is no small logistics problem.

The project is under significant pressure to move fast. Because much of the funding comes from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, construction must be completed by December 2026 — a hard federal deadline. The CDT’s 2026 legislative report acknowledged that permitting challenges were slowing construction pace and that the administration formed a strike team specifically to accelerate permit approvals. Construction costs have risen roughly 40 percent since the project launched, according to CDT Director Liana Bailey-Crimmins in a report by LAist.

Against that backdrop, the question isn’t only whether Direct Drilling failed to follow through on its environmental obligations. It’s who in the chain above them was responsible for verifying that a slurry disposal plan existed before work began — and whether the pressure to meet a federal deadline left compliance as an afterthought.

The Redwood Creek discharge is not the only environmental incident linked to fiber optic drilling in California in recent weeks. On May 22, a construction crew drilling a fiber optic line struck a 16-inch petroleum pipeline in East Los Angeles, spilling an estimated 2,400 gallons of crude oil onto nearby streets, into storm drains and the Los Angeles River.

Nowhere to Take It

Coming up with a legal disposal plan is harder than it sounds — and that difficulty may itself be part of why this happened.

Gray bentonite drilling slurry fills an unpermitted pit excavated at the Meadows Business Park in Redway. The pit was one of at least two sites in Southern Humboldt where drilling waste from the Broadband for All project was disposed of without permits. The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board confirmed no permit exists anywhere in its jurisdiction for disposal of drill-related waste. Photo: California Department of Fish and Wildlife, June 4, 2026.

Ford said he believes no transfer station or landfill in Humboldt County accepts liquid drilling slurry. The water board confirmed no permitted disposal facility for HDD slurry exists anywhere in the North Coast region. The nearest facility believed to accept HDD drilling mud is roughly 220 miles south of Garberville.

Hauling raw slurry that distance in the 800-gallon trailer tanks Direct Drilling was using — ten loads a day — would not be practical or economical. Ford noted that a proper long-haul disposal operation would require large tanker trucks.

What’s unknown is whether that cost was ever factored in. The subcontractor chain on this project runs from CDT down through GoldenStateNet, Arcadian Infracom, North Sky Communications, and Direct Drilling. Whether Direct Drilling or North Sky bid this job with legal slurry disposal costs included — or whether they simply filed no disposal plan and no one in that chain caught it — has not been established.

What Legal Disposal Actually Looks Like

There are recognized paths for managing HDD slurry legally, though none are simple in a region this remote.

The first is on-site reclamation. Standard industry practice for larger HDD jobs calls for a reclaimer — a trailer-mounted system that separates the return fluid on site, filters out the solids, and recycles the liquid back into the drill for reuse over several drilling cycles, significantly reducing the total volume of waste.

What remains after reclaiming, the dried solids, must still pass a paint filter test before a landfill will accept them. As regulations around HDD waste disposal tighten nationally, pH sensitivity and metals testing at disposal facilities is becoming increasingly common, meaning what the drill picks up from the geology matters. The water board said testing to characterize this project’s slurry is still underway.

Some contractors use superabsorbent polymers to solidify slurry on site — products that can reduce pit volumes by more than 90 percent and produce landfill-ready solids in 15 to 30 minutes. Whether any such method was considered on this project is not known.

For public infrastructure projects like broadband buildouts, industry guidance calls for waste management requirements to be written into contracts before work begins — including documented disposal site acceptance, testing protocols, and contingency plans. 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.

Ford said recapture and reuse is his preferred outcome. “Obviously, we would prefer to see this put into some container where they can recapture it, reuse it,” he said. “That would be best.”

A Program-Wide Question

The Broadband for All buildout is one of the largest infrastructure investments in California history. It is also, by design, fast. The CEQA exemption that allowed this project to skip environmental review was created specifically to speed broadband deployment by reducing permitting requirements for linear projects in public rights-of-way.

Speed and scale together create a problem when environmental requirements aren’t followed on the ground. Whatever was committed to on paper, the slurry ended up on private land without permits — something no encroachment permit or regulatory approval would have authorized. Whether that is an isolated failure by one subcontractor, or a symptom of something broader across thousands of miles of active construction statewide, is a question no one has answered yet.

The water board said it believes there may be additional disposal sites beyond the two already identified in Southern Humboldt. Supervising water resource control engineer Adona White said. “We’re trying to find out where they are.”

The investigation remains ongoing. Redheaded Blackbelt will continue to follow this story.

Were You Approached?

Investigators believe there may be additional disposal sites beyond the two already identified. If you were approached by representatives of the drilling operation and asked to accept slurry on your property, whether you agreed or turned them down, Redheaded Blackbelt wants to hear from you. We protect the anonymity of our sources. You can reach Lisa Music at [email protected].

Redheaded Blackbelt requested comment from Arcadian Infracom, North Sky Communications, Direct Drilling, the California Department of Technology, and California legislators prior to publication; none responded. CENIC directed inquiries to the California Department of Technology, which did not respond. Redheaded Blackbelt contacted CalRecycle and Humboldt County Department of Environmental Health regarding slurry disposal regulations; neither responded. Public records requests submitted to Caltrans for construction plan documents had not been fulfilled at the time of publication.

Earlier:

• [Update] Unknown Substance Turns Redwood Creek White, Reaches South Fork Eel River
• Drilling Slurry Believed Source of White Plume in Redwood Creek; Agencies Investigating
• In a Push to Connect Rural California, Broadband Drilling Fouled Southern Humboldt’s Waterways

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