Resident Jeff Moore must realise that he is right to be concerned. We quote below an article which suggests that a great folly was comitted when this landfill was allowed. Now it will inevitably cost a lot of money to protect a major water supply source:
JACKSON TWP. - Jeff Moore worries about the 1 billion pounds of toxic materials buried less than a half-mile from his home on Aber Road.
It's in a 208-acre landfill in rural, northeastern Clermont County - one of only two dumps in Ohio ever licensed to take hazardous waste. And while the site on Aber hasn't accepted such waste in more than 20 years, Moore knows it contains "some real bad stuff," including PCBs, benzene, arsenic, cyanide, toluene, mercury, pesticides and thousands more contaminants.
He fears that toxins could seep into groundwater and the creek that runs behind his home. And he questions what will happen when the owner's 30-year requirement to monitor the landfill expires in 2027.
Those concerns are shared by Clermont County officials and their environmental consultants, who for many years have pointed to troubling issues at the closed landfill known as Cecos. Since 1988, the county has spent $10 million on legal and consulting fees, mostly in an attempt to fix what it says are flaws in the existing plan to monitor the site.
"It's not so much that the county expects there to be an immediate major mishap. It's really about protecting us in the future," said county administrator David Spinney.
The county's biggest concern is that the landfill poses a potential threat to Harsha Lake, a main source of the county's drinking water.
While the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the landfill's owner say measures to protect the environment are in place and working as designed, the county contends that its statistical analysis of data that Cecos is required to report indicates some leakage has already occurred.
"Is it a catastrophic leak? No. Is this a precursor of what will continue to happen? The answer is yes. Eventually it will leak enough that it will present a problem," said Linda Aller, noting that such landfills were designed to contain material for 30 years. She is principal geologist with Bennett & Williams, a Westerville, Ohio-based environmental consulting firm that has been working on Cecos issues for Clermont County since the late 1980s.
Other technical experts hired by the county agree.
Brent Huntsman, president of Beavercreek, Ohio-based Terran Corp., is a geologist who specializes in ground water issues. Given the amount of waste at Cecos, he said, "it's just a matter of time before it escapes into the environment."
That has happened elsewhere. He points, for example, to U.S. Department of Energy hazardous waste landfills such as the Mound Site in Miamisburg. "If you look at all of their large installations, yes, all of their landfills have failed."
At Cecos, "It's going to be sooner rather than later," Huntsman said. "It's going to be within our lifetime."
That's why the county is spending an estimated $5.6 million to expand the water treatment plant at Harsha Lake and outfit it with a sophisticated granular-activated carbon filtration system, Spinney said. But even the new system, he added, "doesn't take care of everything" that might escape from the landfill.
For its part, the Ohio EPA said the current landfill monitoring plan, generally speaking, offers adequate protection. And it said Phoenix-based Republic Services Inc., which became the dump's owner in 2008 when it merged with Allied Waste Industries Inc., is fulfilling its monitoring requirements.
But those requirements are "grossly inadequate," said G. Fred Lee, an environmental consultant in El Macero, Calif., whose contract with Clermont County ended in 1999. Lee, a former university professor with a doctorate in environmental engineering from Harvard, has in the past five decades evaluated the environmental impacts of about 80 landfills, including Cecos.
Republic and Ohio EPA are working to resolve issues on a revised monitoring plan for the landfill, said Connie Dall, Republic's environmental manager at Cecos. She said the company hopes to submit an amended plan early next year.
But if the long, troubled history of Cecos offers any indication, a final resolution isn't likely soon.
Cecos dates to 1972, when Clermont Environmental Reclamation began operation of a 19-acre sanitary landfill. Within a few years, the U.S. EPA approved it for hazardous waste disposal, and the site eventually grew to 208 acres.
Clermont County documents say Cecos includes seven football stadium-sized excavations, or cells, up to 56 feet deep, each containing hazardous waste. Liners and recompacted clay are supposed to keep leachate - the toxic liquid that seeps through waste in the cells - from escaping.
The waste came from many sources, including chemical companies, power companies and businesses with household names, such as Procter & Gamble, IBM, General Electric and Westinghouse, Spinney said.
In the 1980s, criminal charges for violations of hazardous waste laws were brought against Cecos, and both the Ohio and U.S. EPA denied hazardous waste permits. By 1990, hazardous waste disposal had stopped.
Cecos submitted a plan, spelling out how the facility would be maintained and monitored. After a number of revisions, the Ohio EPA approved the plan in September 1994.
Clermont County appealed, saying the plan didn't provide adequate long-term protection to residents. The appeal dragged on for 13 years, never reaching a resolution.
So in 2007, the county decided to take a different approach. It reached a settlement with the Ohio EPA and Cecos, calling for Cecos to submit a revised monitoring plan and the county to submit a petition outlining its issues of concern.
The county's petition, filed last December, includes 2,358 pages of appendices and attachments in support of 15 issues the county says should be addressed. It asks, among other things, for continued or stepped-up monitoring of groundwater wells, leachate, surface water and underdrains, which are piping networks that detect leachate movement through the bottom of cells.
Bonnie Buthker, acting chief of the Ohio EPA's southwest district office, said some of Clermont County's requests can't be granted because they exceed the agency's regulatory authority. She declined to be specific, noting the county's petition is "still under review."
She did say, however, that EPA's interpretation of data submitted by Cecos indicates there has been no leakage from the cells that contain hazardous waste.
"Not from the cells, no," Buthker said. "Not in the 14 years we've been monitoring this."
But the county's consultants, using the same reported data from Cecos, arrived at a different conclusion.
"The consistent presence of volatile organic compounds in the underdrains in all the ... cells indicates that leachate is migrating into them. And once contamination enters the underdrains, it is no longer contained," the county says in its petition.
Spinney, who will retire as county administrator at the end of the year, said, "You'll never get me to say (the leakage) is minor. Is it a health hazard to people in the surrounding area or to the water supply today? No, I don't believe so from what I've seen. But it's an indication of a leak, which means there a potential for a health hazard in the future."
Dall said volatile organic compounds were detected in underdrains in the older part of the landfill, but that corrective measures were put in place to "close that off from the environment, so those (compounds) can't get anywhere. All the analysis we're getting is showing that everything is where it's supposed to be."
She said Republic is "making sure we are a good citizen in Clermont County and the state of Ohio. ... We are doing what the Ohio EPA and the U.S. EPA are asking us to do, and we're doing it appropriately.
"The facility is a safe facility."
As for the landfill's liners, two types were installed at Cecos to serve as a barrier between waste and the environment. Older cells have a 30-mil (slightly less than 1/32 of an inch) synthetic rubber liner; newer cells have an 80-mil (or slightly less than 1/12 of an inch) liner made of high-density polyethylene.
"These liners will fail," said Lee. "That's not a debatable issue."
Said Buthker: "It's really variable on how long liners can last. That's why you have other systems in place (such as wells, leak detectors and underdrains) to monitor to make sure if you have a leak, you can address it right away."
She added: "We feel the existing monitoring plan is protective. We're working to improve that monitoring plan."
Jeff Moore is wary. "Some people put their faith in the government, like they ain't never going to do (anything) wrong, but I'll tell you, I've seen it go the opposite direction on that," he said.
"You know what happened at Fernald," he added, referring to the former uranium-processing plant 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati. It was notorious for contaminating the environment and required a $4.4 billion cleanup.
Many of Moore's neighbors don't share his concerns. A reporter spoke with about a dozen homeowners on roads that border Cecos property, and most echoed the thoughts of Floyd Brate, a Smokey Road resident who said the landfill was a non-issue, "as long as they keep monitoring it like they're supposed to."
Ohio law requires such landfills to be monitored for 30 years after closure, which in the case of Cecos extends to 2027. At that point, the owner could petition to walk away.
"They would have to demonstrate that the waste was no longer there and no longer posed a threat," Ohio EPA's Buthker said. "That would be very difficult to demonstrate." She noted that Ohio's environmental regulations say the state EPA director can extend the monitoring period.
But Clermont County officials want more of a guarantee. They say that because most of the waste in the landfill will remain dangerous "virtually forever," a plan should be established to care for the landfill into perpetuity.
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