PITTSBURGH -- More than 10 million gallons of brine were sprayed on roads last year and some believe it's nothing less than legalized dumping of a hazardous waste.

Brine is used to control dust on dirt and gravel roads only in the western part of Pennsylvania, because this is where all of the oil and gas wells are located and as the drilling increases, so does the brine spreading.

---

Related: Team 4 Investigator Jim Parsons looks at whether toxic chemicals are being spread on local roads. Click here for more on that investigation.

---

On a regular dirt road, when a car goes by there is a cloud of dust, but on a road that has been treated with brine, the salt water from oil and gas wells creates no dust and no mess.

At least, none you can see.

The DEP requires oil and gas companies to take brine to the PBTC if they're not spreading it on roads.

"After being here 20 years, I've seen what's in this stuff," said Elton DeLong, of the Pennsylvania Brine Treatment Company. "The heavy metals and the radiation issue and other things involved with it."

But, DEP Deputy Secretary J. Scott Roberts said, "The waters that come out of the formation, along with the oil and gas, generally don't have elevated concentrations of heavy metals."

"As you can see, as we slow the water down, the flocculation occurs," said DeLong.

After brine is treated, Delong said it is perfectly safe for spreading on roads, but the treated brine isn't the stuff being spread; the raw, untreated brine is.

The sludge that comes out of the brine treatment process is required by Pennsylvania regulations to be sent to a double-lined landfill. It is considered residual waste.

But it's the same gunk that was coming out of the untreated brine, the same stuff that DEP said is perfectly safe to spread on dirt roads.

"Brine is clearly a pollutant," said environmental attorney Bob Ging. "That's why the oil and gas industry spends millions of dollars a year hauling it off to treatment plants, because it's a pollutant."

And in order to spread brine on roads, oil and gas companies need DEP approval.

Team 4 went to DEP's offices to look through the brine spreading files and made some troubling discoveries.

The DEP does require chemical testing of brine, but not for heavy metals, and many companies are allowed to submit the same chemical analysis year after year.

One 2003 application had a chemical analysis from 1988.

Then there were road-spreading reports that showed brine being bumped on the same roads once a week, despite a DEP study that recommends brine be spread "no more than once per month."

"What's driving brine's use is that industry has to get rid of this stuff," said Myron Arnowitt, of Clean Water Action. "Not that it's the best dust control method."

And as oil and gas drilling increases year after year, so has the amount of brine being spread on local roads.

Arnowitt said the DEP has never studied the long-term impact of brine on the environment.

"Some of these contaminants aren't going to degrade," he said. "Every year, if you're putting this stuff down, what happens after 10 years or 20 years? DEP doesn't know because they haven't studied it over any length of time."

"It's a good deal for us," said Neal Burford, of Redbank Township. "Don't cost us nothing. How do you like that?"

Burford and his fellow supervisors in Armstrong County allow three gas and oil companies to spread brine on local roads.

"For the gas company, if they take it anyplace, they've got to pay to dump it," said Burford. "But if they use it on our township roads, it don't cost us nothing and they get rid of their brine."

The DEP calls that beneficial use.

Clean Water Action takes a different view of beneficial use.

"Township officials like it because they get free dust control," said Arnowitt. "Companies like it because they're getting rid of waste for free. It seems like a good idea, the only problem is, why did we call that stuff waste in the first place? We called it waste because there are dangerous things in it."

For Delong, the issue isn't complicated.

"It's a simple matter of legalized dumping," he said. "Just dumping it in a different spot than down in the woods where the well is at. Hauling it on a truck and dumping it on a dirt road is still dumping it in the environment."

The DEP hasn't conducted an environmental impact study on brine in more than eight years. Because the amount of brine being spread on western Pennsylvania roads has doubled since then, Clean Water Action is calling on the DEP to conduct another study.