State slow to complete landfill evaluation project

The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation had hoped to complete the inspections by December 2004, but TDEC has only evaluated 61 percent of the sites so far, according to the department.

Officials blame the slow progress on a lack of funding.

The statewide project began in September 2003 after trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial degreaser, from a closed landfill in Dickson County contaminated surrounding wells.

Since then, TDEC’s Division of Solid Waste Management has evaluated 70 of the 115 now-closed landfills that were open prior to the advent of permitting requirements in 1972.

A recently completed state Comptroller’s Office audit noted that TDEC has only limited information about the old landfills and that many hadn’t been inspected since 1998.

According to the audit, the landfills often don’t have monitors to detect chemicals seeping into groundwater or oozing through to the surface.

“Right now, most of these sites that were closed years ago were never monitored,” said Larry Cook, head of the Knoxville field office of TDEC’s Division of Solid Waste Management.

Many old landfills began as municipal dumps.

“It’s well known that industrial wastes were routinely disposed of (at municipal dumps),” said Mark Quarles, a Nashville-based environmental consultant who investigated the Dickson County landfill. “Many of those landfills will have groundwater pollution problems and (methane) gas migration problems.”

TDEC added landfill evaluations to its workload without additional dollars to pay for them, but that should change next year. The Solid Waste Disposal Control Board approved a plan this month to increase tipping fees for municipal waste at Class I landfills statewide, with the money to go toward more inspections.

TDEC spokeswoman Tisha Calabrese-Benton said the money would fund five positions, plus sampling activities, groundwater analysis and monitoring wells.

Evaluations consist of photographing the sites, assessing land use, ascertaining whether wells are used in the area and other information.

Because there was no extra money to spend on inspections, Cook said, the reviews have been sporadic.

According to the audit, more than half the sites don’t have groundwater monitoring, even though they still contain waste that could potentially cause contamination. Some sites, however, are next to landfills that do have monitoring systems, the audit found.

At the Dickson County landfill, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that an auto manufacturing plant had been burying drums of trichloroethylene since 1973.

TDEC has spent more than $400,000 to sample water in about 300 wells, install water filters at affected households and provide bottled drinking water in the county.