Pittsylvania County landfill fined for waste leak

Comment: Sleeper said the small size of the leak is the reason why the county didn’t notify the public of the leak last spring. (Secret leaks, is this the future, is it legal?)

By John CranePublished: January 27, 2009

Pittsylvania County must pay a $1,300 penalty to the state for a leachate leak discovered last spring at its landfill in Dry Fork.

The leak, a violation of the Virginia Waste Management Act and Virginia Solid Waste Management regulations, involved a “very minimal release of leachate,” Marvin Booth III, enforcement representative with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s Lynchburg office, said Tuesday. “Leachate” is liquid that has passed through solid waste and contains waste material, according to the DEQ.

“No matter how small it is, we have to address it,” Booth said.

Booth said there was little chance that leachate reached the Banister River watershed. (was the leake check?)

During an unannounced, routine quarterly inspection on March 21, DEQ staff discovered a seep in a waste cell entering the landfill’s storm water conveyance system that drains into a sedimentation pond before potentially discharging into a wetlands area next to the Banister River, according to the order from the Virginia Waste Management Board.

Chemical analysis of seep samples by a county environmental consultant found contamination by “metals and organic constituents,” the state board said.

County investigation revealed that a leachate pump impeller had corroded and it no longer pumped leachate from a waste cell at the landfill. The landfill had no flow meters or hour meters, but the county has since installed them and replaced the leachate pump impeller, Booth said.

County Administrator Dan Sleeper said the amount of water involved in the leak was only enough to fill a coffee cup and that the $1,300 civil charge is the department’s minimum fine. Leachate is pumped to a holding pond and is sent to a treatment plant in Chatham, Sleeper said, adding the leak occurred at a closed facility.

The order from the Virginia Solid Waste Management Board states that procedures during periodic inspections of the pump “were not sufficient to detect failures of this nature.”

The county has since instituted procedures for weekly checks of the leachate flow meters, the board said.

Sleeper said the small size of the leak is the reason why the county didn’t notify the public of the leak last spring.