By Marlene Brissenden
Responding to citizen concerns about the Jungo landfill that would deposit 4,000 tons of San Francisco Bay Area garbage daily for 95 years on Jungo Flat, Humboldt County Nevada Commissioners contracted with G. Fred Lee, PhD, one of the world's foremost authorities on landfill construction, to evaluate the project.
In his 55 page Dec. 9, 2011 report (available on the County Commissioners website and on the Nevadans Against Garbage website - read it!), Dr. Lee's findings were highly critical of the project. Lee frequently used words and phrases such as: "unreliable," "inadequate," "grossly inadequate," "significantly misleading," "highly misleading," and "misleading at best," to describe information presented by permit applicant Recology, Inc., their engineering firm Golder Assoc. and the Nevada Dept. of Environmental Protection (NDEP). Dr. Lee was also critical of lax Nevada environmental laws that fail to protect Nevadans and permit their victimization by corporations from states with more stringent laws as well as NDEP misinterpretations of existing Nevada laws and regulations.
A few concerns among Dr. Lee's many negative findings are:
• The technology used by NDEP and Golder Associates to develop information and data within the application permit package is flawed.
• The aquifer in question is important and would eventually become contaminated as the plastic liner system failed. In practice the "dry tomb" landfilling approach is seriously flawed for the protection of groundwater quality; it only serves to postpone release of waste-derived constituents to the environment and is not legal in some states.
• The native soils at the proposed site location are inadequate due to elemental deficiencies in composition and physical characteristics for landfill construction, daily cover, building berms and trenches and supporting the weight of millions of tons of waste above the aquifer.
• The Ground Water Monitoring Plan is grossly inadequate for providing long-term protection against off-site migration of leachate plumes into the underlying aquifer.
• The fact that the proposed landfill area periodically is flooded is similar to locating a landfill in a floodplain, a practice that is prohibited by US EPA and Nevada landfilling regulations.
Dr. Lee concludes that the landfill as proposed will leave the County and the State with a massive liability of impaired public health and destroyed water resources.
Far from being a waste of taxpayer money as has been suggested, Dr. Lee's report is a game changer that validates most of the concerns that the vast majority of Humboldt County residents have expressed since learning about this project two-and-a-half years ago. The Commissioners are to be commended for faithfully representing their constituents and for their courageous response to the bullying and threats of a greedy outside corporation that would contaminate the environment and ruin the beauty of Desert Valley.
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