Hauling trash

Monday, March 6, 2000 | 11:58 a.m.

The place where trash from valley residents was once buried is out of sight but not out of the minds of officials who have to clean it up.

Republic Silver State on Tuesday began hauling 100,000 cubic yards of illegally dumped garbage from outside the Sunrise Mountain landfill, the first step in bringing the leaking dump within federal guidelines.

Up to 80 truckloads of garbage a day -- enough waste to cover two football fields 30 feet deep -- are being hauled to Silver State's Apex landfill, 15 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

Once the first phase is complete sometime in April, local officials can begin to repair a flood channel that overflowed during a September 1998 storm. The overflow sent tons of trash into the Las Vegas Wash, which flows into Lake Mead, Southern Nevada's major drinking water supply.

Silver State estimates it will cost $36 million to analyze, repair and secure the site. The company and the county agreed in July that Silver State will pay for the work as part of a 15-year extension of the municipal garbage pickup contract.

If major problems occur in the coming months, the cost could change, according to Sherri Frakes, technical coordinator for the county's Comprehensive Planning Division.

The overflow of the flood channel in 1998 brought the Environmental Protection Agency into a stalemate among Silver State, which dumped the trash; Clark County, which has leased the site since 1962; and the Bureau of Land Management, which owns the property, over who was responsible for the cleanup.

Cracks -- one 100 feet long -- were discovered in the cover of the closed landfill in 1996. Methane and hydrogen sulfide gases leaked from the cover of the closed landfill. The 726-acre site was capped in 1993. The cracks in the claylike cap sent a rotten-egg odor to neighborhoods a mile away.

For two years the BLM, the county and the company deadlocked on taking action. No one was willing to do more than study the problem.

Then the September 1998 storm dumped 2 inches of rain on the site, strewing the illegal trash 4 miles down the mountain into the Las Vegas Wash.

The wash flows into the area's main drinking water supply and that prompted the EPA to order the cleanup and repairs.

Under EPA orders, the county has to draw up a plan to analyze and clean up the landfill, EPA spokesman David Schmidt said. Then it must complete the cleanup to federal officials' satisfaction. The EPA can fine the county and Silver State up to $25,000 a day if they do not comply.

The EPA has a team of experts in its San Francisco Region 9 office that supervises the cleanup. And the county is spending plenty of time with those experts to draw up a comprehensive solution, EPA water expert David Basinger said. At least two conference calls a month have been the norm.

Basinger visited the landfill during a recent February rainstorm and noticed the runoff didn't affect it because rainfall was light, he said.

Steve Wall of the EPA said that so far investigators working at the site have found the leaking gases but no toxic or radioactive wastes that would be out of the ordinary for an urban landfill.

While the illegally dumped trash is the first problem, the entire landfill could contain roughly 50 million cubic yards of waste or more, Wall said.

It's unlikely that all of that trash will have to be moved. While the EPA has not approved any solution yet, it's likely that once testing is done a new, more weather-resistant cap will be placed on the landfill.

The first thing that will receive attention once the illegal trash is hauled away, however, is repairing the flood channel to drain the site.

Silver State also will be required to drill into the mountain and take soil samples, ground water samples and explore Frenchman Fault, an earthquake fault that may be much younger than experts thought.

Once the site is explored, then it will need air and ground water monitoring.

After that, a special covering that can withstand blistering Southwest summer heat and downpours and frigid weather will cap the wastes.

The county sees a silver lining in the problem. No one knows how much methane gas the mountain contains, the county's Frakes said, but if there is enough and it is good quality, it could be sold as an alternative energy source.

Once a permanent cap and monitors for gas and ground water are in place, the site might used as a park or golf course, county officials said.