County won’t quarantine damaged Sunrise landfill

Thursday, Sept. 24, 1998 | 10:48 a.m.

Clark County's Chief Health Officer Donald Kwalick said today he would not quarantine a 4-mile swath of debris that burst from the closed Sunrise Landfill and flowed into the Las Vegas Wash during a flash flood.

Sierra Club leaders, who planned further investigation of the site today, called for a quarantine of the debris flowing from the old Republic-Silver State Disposal, Inc., landfill.

Randy Harness, national vice chairman of Conservation for the Sierra Club in Nevada and California found intravenous (IV) tubing, household garbage, construction debris and 55-gallons drums that a severe thunderstorm strewed with such force into the wash.

The wash is six miles upstream from Southern Nevada's drinking water intake pipelines, Harness noted.

Harness called for a task force to tackle the public health and environmental issues from closed dumps, sewage spills and other problems in the wash.

"No, we will not quarantine it," Kwalick said of the debris. That would mean closing the area to anyone, such as a group planning to hold a paint-ball event on Friday. Paint-ballers shoot at each other with blobs of paint while the shooters hide behind the bushes growing near the wash.

There is no threat to public health from the debris that is exposed to sunlight.

However, Kwalick said warning signs should be posted along the waste stream until Silver State can clean up the refuse that came from the landfill. Almost 3 inches of rain fell at the site on Sept. 11, causing a controversial cover on the landfill to burst.

Silver State Attorney Robert Groesbeck said the company will remove all the debris that left the landfill. The site is leased by Clark County from the Bureau of Land Management. In turn, the county leased the site to Silver State in 1962 for a municipal dump site. Under a closure agreement, Silver State is responsible to maintain the landfill and its cover.

The Clark County Health District and the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection plan to meet next week about the future of the landfill that stopped accepting waste in 1993 and was capped by the spring of 1995.