EPA says landfill no threat to wells
The Akron Beacon Journal
EAST SPARTA - Canton's well field is safe from any contamination should runoff leak from Countywide Recycling & Disposal Facility in southern Stark County.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency said the landfill does not pose a threat to Canton's well field, which is near Beach City and not Strasburg, as was reported in a Beacon Journal story Jan. 24.
That's because Canton's well field is uphill from the landfill, EPA hydrogeologist Jeff Rizzo said.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is investigating whether the 258-acre landfill in Pike Township is on fire or whether heat and odor problems there are being caused by a major chemical reaction that's the result of aluminum wastes mixing with liquids.
New Ohio EPA Director Christopher Korleski is scheduled to appear at a Friday meeting of the governing board of the Stark-Tuscarawas-Wayne Solid Waste Management District. He will answer questions on Countywide from the nine county commissioners who make up the board and then meet with the press and Club 3000, a grass-roots organization that has opposed the landfill.
The meeting at 9:30 a.m. will be in the garbage district offices outside of Bolivar on Wiltshire Boulevard.
Korleski is then scheduled to go to Countywide, where he will confer with the landfill staff and Todd Thalhamer, a California-based expert on landfill fires.
Thalhamer flew over Countywide on Wednesday in an Ohio Highway Patrol helicopter equipped with infrared equipment, EPA spokesman Mike Settles said.
Thalhamer, a firefighter and a staff member with the California EPA, is consulting on the odor and heat problems at Countywide.
A fire at the landfill could threaten a synthetic liner that helps keep leachate, or liquid runoff, from the groundwater.
The EPA said any leakage from the landfill is unlikely. Countywide's synthetic liner is atop 10 feet of highly impermeable clay. A system of monitoring wells circles the dump to detect any contamination that might get into the aquifer under the landfill.
Rizzo said any contamination that did reach the aquifer would likely flow into streams near the landfill and ultimately into the Tuscarawas River.
The contamination threat to the buried valley aquifer that provides drinking water to Tuscarawas County and counties to the south appears to be minimal, he said.
That point is disputed by Julie Weatherington Rice of Bennett & Williams, a Columbus environmental consulting firm.
She has been investigating the groundwater for the village of Bolivar and for Club 3000.
Contamination from the landfill might leak via fractures in the bedrock and pollute the groundwater, including the interconnected buried valley aquifers, because there are no barriers, she said.
She and Rizzo have argued about groundwater questions near Countywide before the Ohio Environmental Appeals Review Commission, which is hearing appeals on the landfill's expansion.
The EPA also took issue with a Beacon Journal illustration that was published Jan. 24. Ohio law requires 15 feet of separation between the bottom of the landfill and the upper-most aquifer, said Rizzo, who called the illustration "misleading.''
The graphic was intended to show a cross-section of a landfill and was not intended to show the specific geology at Countywide.
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