Good news about the leachate management at the Cherokee Nation landfill. In a recent article it was announced that Tribe’s landfill may still have some issues, as far as the residents are concerned, but it is being operated better. In particular, a leachate pond used to catch water that leached from waste dumped at the Cherokee Nation landfill near Cherokee Tree, Okla., is no longer used and should be phased out soon. Read the full except below. Then take a look at the orignal article using the link provided below the article:
Three years ago, the Cherokee Nation’s landfill in Adair County was in the process of re-opening after facing regulatory issues two years before. The landfill closed in 2008, and its operator, Indian Country Investments, was fined more than $1 million by the CN Environmental Protection Commission for environmental violations, including leakage from an unlined storage pond, excessive methane gas levels and failing to adequately cover refuse with soil.In July 2009, the landfill re-opened under Cherokee Nation Waste Management and has been under CNWM’s care since.CN Environmental Programs Administrator Tom Elkins said CNWM monitors the landfill to ensure its compliance with CN environmental regulations. He said the landfill still deals with issues, but is operating much better.
Elkins said one issue is an unused leachate pond. Leachate is water that has run over or through trash. He said tanks capture the leachate but the pond now collects rainwater, sometimes to its capacity.He said CNWM wants to close out the pond, but to do so would require removing “millions” of gallons of leachate from the pond and shipping it to nearby Stilwell to be processed, which isn’t cost feasible. Elkins said the tribe’s EPC has informed CNWM that it needs to address the pond’s needs and pump out the leachate water.
He said the EPC has instructed him to have a violation notice ready for the commission’s June meeting in case CNWM has not addressed the pond’s problem. “It that doesn’t encourage them to do it, it will go into the next step of regulatory issues,” he said.The landfill, on average, takes in 100 tons of trash a day, Elkins said. “That’s really not much for a landfill. At one time, they took might have taken 1,800 tons (a day), which was probably more than they should have taken,” he said.The trash comes from throughout northeastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas. Another issue for the landfill has been trash, mainly plastic bags, blowing out of trash trucks. CNWM has installed “trash-catch fences” to keep bags from leaving the landfill property and blowing into neighboring properties.“It’s more of a housekeeping issue than it is a regulatory issue,”Elkins said.He added that landfill workers also are assigned to pick up trash not caught by the fences. “It’s being taken care of a lot better than it was,” he said. A regulatory issue that has been addressed since CNWM began operating the landfill is uncovered trash. Trash dumped into the landfill must be covered daily by dirt.“It’s an issue we have to stay on top of. If you have uncovered trash, you start getting rats, birds…that spread disease. We can’t have that, so we’re on that tight about getting that covered up,” Elkins said. Despite its issues, the landfill is needed to prevent a potentially worse situation caused by illegal dumping on rural roads, Elkins said. Locals use illegal dumping sites or wildcat dumps when they no longer have a place to dump trash.Elkins said the last time the landfill stopped taking trash county commissioners in northeast Oklahoma informed tribal leaders that communities did not have a place to take their trash.
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