Inside Loads, Illegal Waste

Seagulls scavenge at the Middle Peninsula Landfill & Recycling Facility in Gloucester County. (Jay Paul – For The Washington Post)

As truck after truck of waste comes to the Gloucester mega-fill, hundreds of sea gulls circle, hundreds more line up in rows.

They gather on the football-field-size area atop a landfill where trucks eject their loads and massive machines resembling moon buggies compact and bulldoze trash: household discards from grapefruit peels to tires; trash from businesses; tanks of sewage sludge; incinerator ash.

But there are limits to what can be added. Banned are substances defined under federal law as hazardous waste – such as radioactive materials or poisonous or cancer-causing chemicals. A hauler needs a special permit to carry and dump those loads, and the law requires that it be incinerated or sterilized before it is buried.

The safeguards are in place to protect landfill workers from being exposed to contagious diseases such as hepatitis or cuts from objects such as scalpels, said Steve Frazier, a hazardous-waste technical adviser with the state Department of Environmental Quality. For the general public, Frazier said, the risks arise when medical waste is shipped in an unapproved truck that could allow the waste to tumble out and land where someone could come in contact with it.

Officials at three companies that operate Virginia's mega-fills – Waste Management Inc. and Browning-Ferris Industries Inc., both of Houston, and Allied Waste Industries Inc., based in Scottsdale, Ariz. – say they are committed to keeping hazardous waste out of their landfills. And they have urged customers to keep it out of trash.

But they don't always succeed.

State records show that untreated syringes, tubes with blood, even red bags with biohazard symbols repeatedly have arrived from New York City at the Gloucester and Sussex mega-fills, and at Brunswick from Durham. At other sites, state records show, a low-level radioactive device was buried, as were more than 10 tons of hazardous lead paint waste.

At Gloucester alone, state DEQ records show, biohazard bags were spotted at least 50 times in the last year. At Sussex, three sightings of medical waste occurred in one day last fall. Medical waste also turned up, although less often, in Amelia, Charles City and King and Queen counties, records show.

When a bag is noticed among the tons of trash, it is set aside until a hazardous-waste firm arrives to remove it. The problem, landfill workers and management acknowledge, is spotting them.

"If you find four red bags in a day, how many others are you covering up? At least five or six," said Lee Rust, 48, who worked at the Gloucester landfill for three years before resigning last year with a stellar written recommendation from the landfill manager. "I would swear to it on my heart that there is a lot of medical waste buried there."

State inspectors visit sites at least once every three months, but Virginia does not require constant monitoring. Brunswick, Sussex and Amelia have hired county inspectors, but only Brunswick and King George have enough staff to ensure that one is on duty whenever the landfill is open.

Tips that illegal medical waste was coming to Virginia surfaced years ago.

During a 1996 FBI investigation of a Browning-Ferris Industries medical-waste treatment plant in the District, three employees told an FBI investigator that human and animal body parts, blood, radioactive waste and chemotherapy chemicals were "inadvertently processed" and sent to Browning-Ferris's King and Queen County mega-fill, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The Fairview Avenue site since has closed, and Browning-Ferris pleaded guilty in June to violations of the Clean Water Act that stemmed from the federal investigation, agreeing to pay a $1.5 million fine.

In May 1992, William W. Hill, chief of enforcement for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, notified Virginia that during roadside inspections, his staff noticed that a "large number" of haulers en route from Philadelphia to Charles City carried asbestos and medical waste, according to a letter on file in Richmond.

"They are cocktailing the stuff," Hill said, referring to the practice of mixing hazardous medical waste with routine trash. Hill said he was disappointed when Virginia officials failed to get back to him.

Dennis H. Treacy, director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, said he could not explain the lack of response by his predecessors. But he noted that the state spent more than a year investigating Waste Management after medical waste sent through its New York depots repeatedly turned up in Virginia. "There appears to be a problem that needs to be addressed," he said.

Waste Management officials say they are committed to stopping the flow of medical waste. They have agreed to spend $55,000 to produce training videos about medical-waste laws for hospitals and trash haulers, in addition to paying a $70,000 state fine for three violations. And in the spring, the company opened a special site in New York to hand-sort and separate waste from health care facilities.

Yet as recently as this summer, medical waste turned up occasionally at Virginia's landfills, according to state and local records. And as long as some is arriving, at least a portion likely is being buried, company officials acknowledged.

"Something can slip through," acknowledged Christine Meket, a Waste Management regional manager. "Maybe there is a little tiny bit in all these tons."

Environmental Threats

Each has a several-foot-thick lining of clay and an impervious synthetic fabric to prevent rain or other liquids from draining into the ground. Pipes and pumps collect water that accumulates above the liner for treatment. Systems monitor methane gas, an explosive byproduct of rotting garbage.

Building these high-tech landfills costs as much as $400,000 an acre, a cost, the industry notes, that it – not local governments – covered.

"We go in and replace landfills with no groundwater protection with exactly what the environmentalists want. Only by [importing waste] could you generate enough tonnage to justify the expense of building these new landfills," said Lowell C. Spires Jr., a Waste Management employee who helped oversee development of two Virginia mega-fills.

DEQ inspectors have been impressed generally with mega-fill operations, giving them "satisfactory" ratings during most quarterly inspections. But some Virginia officials – such as Del. Harvey B. Morgan (R-Gloucester) – still question how good a deal Virginia is getting.

Even state-of-the-art systems "will ultimately fail due to natural deterioration," Morgan said. "And when the chemical stew in the big tub overflows or when the weight of several hundred feet [of trash] causes the stuff to ooze or stream though the liner and find its way to the aquifer or other tributary of the Chesapeake – who's responsible?"

At the two oldest mega-fills, there already are hints of possible flaws. In Amelia County, groundwater tests last year found elevated levels of lead, chromium and other substances, while another contaminant, antimony, showed up in groundwater near the Charles City landfill. Additional samples are being collected to determine whether the landfills caused the problem due to leaks in their liners.

If there is something wrong at the sites, "we will immediately find the source and correct it," said Meket, the Waste Management spokesman.

Some residents near the mega-fills share Morgan's fears and suspect their home towns were chosen as trash sites in part because they lack clout.

In the counties with mega-fills, residents are on average much poorer, less well educated and more likely to be African American than the average Virginian, according to the U.S. Census.

"Landfill companies target us because we are land-rich and dollar-poor," said Bonnie Ware, 46, a landfill opponent and 20-year resident of Charles City who runs a kennel. Supervisors are enticed by the payments the landfills offer, "but because the residents are dollar-poor, we can't fight them."

Meket adamantly challenges the suggestion that the companies targeted poor minority communities for landfills. "We were responding to the needs of these communities as outlined by their elected officials."

Once the landfills are running – and bringing in jobs and revenue – opposition tends to die down.

But others say the silence stems from powerlessness. "Those of us against it when it started are still against it. But there ain't much we can do," said John V. Bohatec, 77, a retired Navy gunner who lives near the Sussex landfill, which has so far contributed $12.7 million to county coffers.

The most intense conflict has been in King and Queen County between a Baptist church and its next-door neighbor, a Browning-Ferris Industries landfill. Members of the 128-year-old church stopped holding picnics because so many buzzards and sea gulls assemble and noise from the landfill is oppressive. "This church is an historic church, built by former slaves," said Pernell Byrd, 59, a logger and the deacon at Second Mount Olive Baptist Church, who lives less than a mile from the landfill. "Yet today it is threatened."

The church's battle intensified this year when Browning-Ferris received state permission to expand the dump.

Neighbors of several other mega-fills say detailed tests aren't necessary to prove what they already know: The arrival of the landfill changed their lives.

Diann Richards, 53, has lived near Amelia for 15 years.

"We keep right up with the New York news," said Richards, because New York newspapers regularly blow into her yard.