Direction of groundwater flow a key in Sunrise landfill probe

Wednesday, March 25, 1998 | 9:55 a.m.

The Bureau of Land Management plans to hunt for the direction groundwater flows at the closed, unlined Sunrise Landfill after further tests uncovered toxic and cancer-causing chemicals buried there.

It will take about a month before the groundwater report is ready, said BLM spokesman Mike Moran, in charge of the solid waste study at the Las Vegas office.

The greatest mystery is how fast and what direction the groundwater flows at the site, about 15 miles east of Las Vegas. "If it gets to the Las Vegas Wash, then there is an enormous problem," Moran said. The Las Vegas Wash flows into Lake Mead, Southern Nevada's major drinking water source.

"If we can get to it before it gets to the wash, then it's the prudent thing to do," Moran said.

Two Colorado consultants to the BLM tested gases and soils at the landfill in December and February, finding solvents and petroleum products linked to cancers everywhere but in the Sunrise medical waste pit at the south end of the 720-acre property.

The municipal landfill was closed in October 1993 and capped in March 1994.

"So far, the investigation has raised more questions than we have answers," Moran said.

Three blackened lagoons where liquids had been dumped were discovered by the BLM as investigators punched 90 test holes in and around the landfill. Two of them are on BLM parcels next to the landfill. One is the sludge pit.

Sludge has been sent to the landfill from local treatment plants because it contains such disease-causing agents as typhus, diphtheria, hepatitis and polio.

Aerial photographs show that the black lagoons have existed since March 1989, said Alan Gaddy, vice president of Silver State Disposal Co., the parent company in charge of municipal waste management in Clark County.

Dirt roads north of landfill reach the northwest lagoon, visible from the former dump site.

Gaddy noted that dumping could have occurred years before Silver State started operating the Sunrise landfill in 1963. "You could dispose of your waste any way you wanted to," he said.

No record of amounts or types of waste are available before 1990, Gaddy said.

Clark County also burned trash in a pit further north of that northwest lagoon, Gaddy said.

BLM consultants, CCJM Environmental Consultants Inc. and TEG Rocky Mountain, both of Colorado, discovered a 35-gallon drum in the northwest lagoon. It had collapsed, eating away identification and a nearby Budweiser beer can. The investigators said the lagoons had contained liquid.

The consultants' report said that the contamination could be spread through sewage sludge that was not fully drained or biological materials not fully processed. No source of the contamination has been defined.