Raw Sewage Into Sacred Water: How Northern Arapaho Utilities Failed the Wind River Reservation for Years

EvilCorporations.com • CWA-08-2024-0022 / EPA Region 8 / Beaver Creek Lagoon Facility • 10 min read

The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Documents Can’t Quantify

The Wind River Reservation is not an abstraction. It is home. It is where the Northern Arapaho Tribe, a federally recognized nation, lives and has maintained its presence under one of the more fraught arrangements in American history. The Wind River runs through it. The Little Wind River runs into the Wind River. These waters do not appear in the record as scenic resources or recreational amenities. They appear because sewage went into them, or threatened to.

The failures documented in this case began no later than 2018. Unauthorized sewage releases happened. Nobody called the EPA. Nobody took samples. Nobody filed the required reports. The people living downstream on the Wind River Reservation had no official notice that the facility entrusted with handling their community’s wastewater had released sewage into the waterway system that defines their land.

By the time federal inspectors arrived on June 30, 2021, the physical infrastructure was visibly decaying. The berms, which are the earthen walls holding sewage inside lagoon cells 3, 4, and 5, had deteriorated to the point where their structural integrity was compromised. These are not hairline cracks. A compromised berm on a sewage lagoon is the physical equivalent of a cracked wall in a dam. The only question is when it fails completely, not whether.

There was no operations and maintenance manual on site. There was no record of maintenance being performed. There was no copy of the facility’s operating permit on site. The lift station serving the Beaver Creek Housing area, a residential community, was improperly maintained. “Beaver Creek Housing” is not a commercial park. It is where people live.

The consent order was signed September 25, 2024. The initial EPA inspection was June 30, 2021. That is three years and nearly three months between when federal regulators documented structural failure at a sewage facility serving a tribal community and when a legally binding remediation order was issued. During those three years, people continued to live on this land. The Little Wind River continued to flow into the Wind River. The lagoon berms continued to exist in a state of compromised integrity.

No financial penalty was assessed. No individual was charged. No family was compensated for years of living adjacent to a structurally compromised sewage lagoon that was releasing waste without sampling, reporting, or accountability. The consent order’s final terms offer no acknowledgment that the people most exposed to this failure are members of a Native nation that has already lost almost everything once before.

Legal Receipts: What the Government’s Own Documents Say

Every quote below comes directly from Docket No. CWA-08-2024-0022, the Administrative Order for Compliance on Consent signed by EPA Region 8 Director Suzanne J. Bohan on September 25, 2024. These are not allegations made by outside parties. They are the EPA’s own documented findings.

“Respondent failed to comply with part 4.1 of the 2016 Permit when unauthorized releases occurred in approximately 2018 and 2019.”

• This confirms that raw or partially treated sewage was discharged into the environment without authorization on at least two separate occasions, years before regulators formally documented the problem.
• The word “approximately” signals that the utility either did not record when these releases happened or did not communicate the precise dates to regulators, which itself reflects the absence of functional incident-tracking at the facility.

“Respondent failed to sample, report, and notify EPA of unauthorized releases in accordance with parts 4.1, 4.2, and 5.8 of the 2016 Permit.”

• The permit required sampling of any unauthorized release, notification to EPA within 24 hours of becoming aware, and a written follow-up report within 5 days. All three requirements were violated.
• This means regulators had no data on what was released, how much was released, or what contaminants were present. The downstream water quality impact of the 2018 and 2019 releases remains undocumented to this day.

“Respondent failed to properly maintain the lagoon berms which compromised the integrity of cells 3, 4, and 5, in violation of part 6.5 of the 2016 Permit.”

• Three of the lagoon’s cells had structurally compromised containment walls at the time of the 2021 inspection. This is not a paperwork failure. This is the physical barrier between sewage and the surrounding environment beginning to fail.
• The 2016 Permit required the facility to “at all times properly operate and maintain all facilities and systems of treatment and control.” The word “at all times” carries legal weight. Failure here is not a one-time event; it is a sustained pattern of neglect.

“Respondent failed to properly operate and maintain the Beaver Creek Housing lift station per part 6.5 of the 2016 Permit.”

• A lift station is a pump system that moves sewage uphill or across terrain to the treatment facility. If a lift station fails, sewage backs up into the collection system, which can mean sewage backing up into homes or overflowing into the surrounding environment.
• The Beaver Creek Housing lift station serves a residential area. The consent order’s remediation requirement gives the utility six months from the effective date to fix or replace the pump and provide photographic documentation to EPA.

“This Consent Order does not constitute a waiver or election by the EPA to forego any civil or criminal action to seek penalties, fines, or other relief as it may deem appropriate under the Act. Section 309(d) of the Act, 33 U.S.C. § 1319(d), authorizes civil penalties of up to $66,712 (as adjusted for inflation by 40 C.F.R. part 19) per day for each violation of the Act.”

• The EPA explicitly preserved the right to pursue financial penalties after issuing this compliance order. As of September 25, 2024, no penalty has been assessed under this docket.
• With violations spanning multiple years and multiple permit conditions, the theoretical accumulated daily penalty exposure runs into the tens of millions of dollars. The consent order, as written, costs Northern Arapaho Utilities nothing beyond the cost of compliance with rules they were already required to follow.

“In signing this Consent Order, Respondent neither admits nor denies the Findings in paragraphs 17 through 27, above. Without any admission of liability, Respondent consents to the issuance of this Consent Order and agrees to abide by all of its conditions.”

• This is standard legal language in administrative consent orders, and it deserves to be named plainly for what it is: the entity responsible for a sewage facility that released waste without reporting it, let containment berms deteriorate on three lagoon cells, and failed to maintain a residential lift station, faces zero legal admission of fault.
• Nobody said they did it. Nobody said they did not. The sewage still went where it went. The berms still deteriorated when they deteriorated. The residents of Beaver Creek Housing still lived next to a poorly maintained pump station. The legal language changes none of that.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When Infrastructure Fails

Environmental Degradation

The documented violations at Beaver Creek Lagoon created direct pathways for untreated or inadequately treated sewage to enter the waterway system serving the Wind River Reservation.

• Unauthorized sewage releases in approximately 2018 and 2019 discharged into an environment connected to the Little Wind River, a tributary of the Wind River. Because no sampling was ever conducted, the contaminant load, including biological pathogens, chemical oxygen demand, and nutrient pollution, was never measured and remains unknown.
• Compromised berm integrity on lagoon cells 3, 4, and 5 means the earthen walls containing raw and partially treated sewage had begun to fail structurally. A berm breach on a sewage lagoon releases concentrated biological and chemical waste directly into surrounding soil and groundwater, which can then migrate to surface water.
• The 2016 Permit required the utility to notify EPA of any “substantial change in volume or character of pollutants” entering the system. The capacity issues documented by EPA inspectors suggest the volume of waste flowing into the lagoon system had exceeded what the facility was designed to handle, without any such notification being made.
• The Little Wind River feeds the Wind River, which is classified as a traditional navigable water of the United States. Any contamination introduced upstream propagates downstream. The ecological and cultural significance of the Wind River to the Northern Arapaho people amplifies the impact of each unmonitored release.

Public Health

The residents most exposed to the consequences of these failures are the Northern Arapaho tribal members living on the Wind River Reservation, and specifically those served by the Beaver Creek Housing lift station.

• An improperly maintained lift station in a residential area creates risk of sewage backups into homes and sanitary sewer overflows onto streets and yards. The consent order confirms the Beaver Creek Housing lift station was not properly maintained, and the pump requires fixing or replacement within six months of the order’s effective date.
• Sewage lagoon systems that lack proper operations and maintenance documentation, as confirmed here, cannot demonstrate that treatment processes are functioning correctly. Undertreated effluent discharged into a waterway carries pathogens including fecal coliform bacteria, which cause gastrointestinal illness and, at high exposure, more severe infections.
• The 2018 and 2019 unauthorized releases occurred without any public notification. Residents who used the Wind River or its tributaries for subsistence, recreation, or cultural practices had no way of knowing that sewage had been released into those waters.
• The absence of an operations and maintenance manual at the facility means no standardized response protocol existed for equipment failures or overflow events. Without a protocol, workers at the facility had no documented procedure for containing or mitigating a sewage release, increasing the risk that any future incident would also go unreported and uncontained.

Economic Inequality

The systemic conditions enabling this failure are inseparable from the economic and political marginalization of tribal nations within the American regulatory structure.

• The EPA is the sole NPDES permitting and enforcement authority on the Wind River Reservation. No state or tribal governmental entity has been approved to implement the program there. This means the Northern Arapaho people have no local regulatory body with the authority to catch and correct these violations faster than a federal agency operating from Denver, Colorado.
• The gap between the 2021 inspection and the 2024 consent order is not unusual for federal environmental enforcement on tribal lands, where regulatory capacity is chronically underfunded and understaffed relative to the number of facilities and the severity of infrastructure deficits. Communities with political and economic power receive faster enforcement responses.
• The consent order imposes no financial penalty on Northern Arapaho Utilities. While avoiding a penalty preserves the utility’s budget for infrastructure repairs, it also means there is no financial consequence for years of non-compliance. The message sent to regulated entities is that the cost of ignoring permit requirements is, at minimum in this case, zero dollars.
• The preliminary engineering report outlining facility upgrade options was submitted August 9, 2023. The consent order was not issued until September 25, 2024, more than a year later. Tribal utility infrastructure upgrades often depend on federal grants and technical assistance programs that are chronically undersubscribed. The time between identifying a fix and securing resources to implement it is a structural inequality built into the system, not a failure of individual will.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric: What Zero Penalty Actually Costs

What Now: The Names, The Bodies, and the Next Steps

The consent order assigns responsibility to Northern Arapaho Utilities, an Indian tribal organization operating under the laws of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, and identifies EPA Region 8 as the sole regulatory authority on the Wind River Reservation for NPDES purposes. The order is effective immediately upon receipt by the utility and expires only upon full completion of required upgrades.

Who Owns This

• The Respondent and responsible party is Northern Arapaho Utilities, identified in the consent order as both the owner and operator of the Beaver Creek Lagoon Facility.
• The EPA official contact for all required reporting is Brit Rustad (Rustad.brit@epa.gov / (303) 312-6885), EPA Region 8.
• The consent order was signed by Suzanne J. Bohan, Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 8, on September 25, 2024.
• All reports submitted under the order must be signed and certified by a ranking elected official of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, under penalty of law for false submissions.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies With Jurisdiction or Oversight Interest

• EPA Region 8, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division: The primary enforcer. Sole NPDES authority on the Wind River Reservation. Any failure to meet consent order deadlines should be reported to Brit Rustad at the contact information above.
• EPA Office of Water: National policy authority over the NPDES program. Systemic failures in tribal NPDES enforcement are documented and reported to this office.
• EPA Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights: Tribal communities bear disproportionate infrastructure deficits. This case is directly relevant to ongoing EJ enforcement priorities.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division: Holds authority to pursue civil and criminal enforcement referrals from EPA under Section 309(c) and (d) of the Clean Water Act. EPA’s consent order explicitly preserved these referral rights.
• Indian Health Service (IHS): Federal agency responsible for providing sanitation infrastructure funding and technical assistance to tribal nations. The utility’s infrastructure failures are directly connected to chronic underfunding at the IHS Sanitation Facilities Construction program level.

Resistance and Mutual Aid

• If you live on or near the Wind River Reservation, request public records from EPA Region 8 under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for all inspection reports, correspondence, and compliance tracking records related to Docket No. CWA-08-2024-0022. You have the right to this information. Use it.
• Contact the Northern Arapaho Tribal Business Council directly to ask for public reporting on progress under the consent order. Quarterly update reports are required under paragraph 29(a). Ask to see them.
• Connect with tribal environmental justice organizations such as the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), both of which track and support tribal communities navigating federal environmental enforcement gaps.
• Demand that your congressional representatives support increased funding for the IHS Sanitation Facilities Construction program and for EPA tribal NPDES implementation capacity. The gap between what tribal utilities need and what they receive in federal infrastructure support is the structural condition that makes failures like this one predictable.
• Document what you see. If you observe conditions at or downstream from the Beaver Creek Lagoon that suggest continued non-compliance (unusual odors, discoloration in the Little Wind River, visible structural changes at the facility), photograph and report to EPA Region 8 at (303) 312-6885.