Landfill Situation Still Sketchy
by Alex Brooks
At the January 20 meeting of the Petersburgh Town Board, Supervisor Dennis Smith said at a meeting that day he and Berlin Supervisor Rob Jaeger were shown a draft of a Consent Order between DEC and the two towns specifying the requirements for cleanup of the leachate that is coming out of the landfill and running into a stream at the bottom of it. Smith said the Consent Order was, “not too favorable to the Town.” He said he had expected the Town’s environmental attorney Kevin Young to come to this meeting to tell the Board about it, but Young had e-mailed at 3 pm that day to say that the terms and conditions of the Consent Order are not yet settled, and he is not yet ready to speak publicly about it.
Ben Krahforst pressed Smith to say more about where the Town stands on the landfill contamination. Smith said that DEC had put in some test wells and tested water in various parts of the landfill. They found PFOA, PFOS, iron and copper in the water. He said he needed to talk to the attorney about what he can say before going into it anymore.
At this point Town Attorney Dave Gruenberg stepped in to give a summary of where things stand. He said installation of a leachate collection system was required as part of the landfill closure order given to the Town when the State told it to close the landfill. When the Town contracted with Energy Answers to close the landfill, that requirement was part of the job. But Energy Answers did not install a leachate collection system, and for some reason that is not too clear at this distance, they were not held accountable at that time. Petersburgh’s environmental attorney Kevin Young is trying to get the company that bought Energy Answers – Covanta – to take responsibility for the failure to contain the leachate. Gruenberg said Covanta initially “came back hard against that idea,” but now they are part of the agreement and they will contribute to the cost of installing a leachate collection system. Gruenberg said he believes the capital cost is in the neighborhood of $225,000, and his understanding is that Covanta is expected to agree to pay for most of that, but since the agreement has not yet been finalized, we will have to wait to find out anything more specific than that.
It is not yet clear if the leachate collection system will include some kind of filtration or treatment which would allow the treated water to be released on site, or if all of the leachate collected will have to be trucked off to a facility that can clean it. The latter could be very expensive and Gruenberg said he had no information about what arrangements are being made for operation and maintenance of the leachate collection system. Smith said the engineers are looking into the feasibility of keeping clean water running off the mountain from getting mixed into the landfill leachate, so as to reduce the amount of leachate that needs to be either treated or hauled away. But no details were available on how extensive such work might be.