Illegally dumped garbage to be cleared

Friday, Feb. 25, 2000 | 12:15 p.m.

Garbage dumped illegally next to the closed Sunrise Mountain landfill, further fouling an already hazardous situation, will be hauled away beginning in mid-April, federal and Clark County officials said Thursday.

All parties agree it is a first step to finding a permanent solution to an eyesore of an old landfill that has leaked methane and hydrogen sulfide into the air and has spewed trash into Southern Nevada's drinking water.

EPA investigators said the landfill is still leaking "unacceptably high" levels of methane gas from trash buried there since 1962.

The county and Republic Silver State Disposal Co. are under Environmental Protection Agency orders to clean up and properly close the 726-acre landfill near the base of Frenchman Mountain, also known as Sunrise Mountain, on the eastern edge of the valley.

Last year the EPA charged both the county and Silver State with violations of clean-water and solid-waste laws after a September 1998 storm ripped open the dumpsite, spilling garbage and medical wastes 4 miles away into Las Vegas Wash, which flows into Lake Mead, the valley's major drinking water supply.

But as bad as the landfill situation is, it has been aggravated by the illegal dumping next door. EPA investigators estimate that 100,000 cubic yards of household garbage was illegally dumped just northeast of the landfill.

The EPA's Susanna Trujillo in San Francisco said the federal agency has worked closely with all parties. Telephone conferences are held twice a month.

"I would say more has been done out there than anything in the past," she said.

Before any of the illegal refuse is moved, it has to be tested for anything harmful, Silver State attorney Robert Groesbeck said. The time between now and April also will give Silver State, the county and the EPA time to meet with neighbors of the landfill who complained to authorities more than three years ago about foul odors drifting into their homes a mile away.

Up to 10 trucks an hour are expected to begin hauling that trash to the Apex landfill, about 15 miles northeast of Las Vegas. That landfill is also owned by Silver State. The removal will take about 40 days, EPA officials said Thursday.

The reason the off-site pile has to be removed first is simple: A drainage ditch following the natural canyon away from the landfill cannot be constructed until the garbage goes, explained EPA's Steve Wall of the San Francisco office. Once the channel is straightened, water will avoid the buried wastes.

David Basinger of the EPA's water division visited the landfill in the rainstorm on Wednesday. The rain did not pummel the site the way the intense storm of 1998 did and nothing tumbled out of the landfill, he said. But the drainage channel had only been dredged and filled with clean dirt. There was no liner in place.

However, Basinger said a long-term, comprehensive solution has to address both the illegal dumping and the landfill itself so that the site will not pose an environmental or public health threat. The work in the next three to six months is a temporary solution.

Then it is time to tackle the 50 million cubic yards of junk buried at the landfill. That's enough garbage to cover two football fields side by side to a depth of 30 feet.

Most of the landfill's remains will stay put. But the EPA, the county and the company have to figure out a permanent covering. A clay-type cap put in place in 1993 failed to weather the desert's extremes.

The EPA will have to approve a long-term, permanent plan addressing a cover for the landfill plus taking care of the escaping gases and groundwater issues.

Last year Silver State submitted a site assessment plan that was reviewed, rewritten and returned with approval by EPA on Jan. 28.

The first step under this plan included a sampling analysis, but EPA found it deficient because it did not include deep groundwater monitoring wells. The plan was returned to Silver State with a Feb. 29 deadline.

"They need to fix it, or they are in violation of the order," EPA spokesman David Schmidt said. Violating EPA's order can bring penalties of $25,000 a day.

"There is a lot of work to do," Groesbeck said. "There are goals to meet and we are going to meet them."

Silver State leased the site from the county as an official landfill before environmental laws were imposed in the 1970s. The county, in turn, leased the land from the Bureau of Land Management.

For the BLM's Mike Moran, whose agency sounded the alarm on the hazards of gas and ground-water contamination, the atmosphere on the mountain is sweeter than it's been in years.

"There is a tremendous amount of work to be done and proposed to be done," he said.

"The public is going to be served now, and it will be closed properly," Moran said.