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Report Trashes Pasco Landfill Plan

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By STEVE ANDREWS | News Channel 8

Published: February 6, 2009

Updated: 02/06/2009 04:10 pm

TAMPA - A 30-page report sent this morning to the governor and to Florida's Department of Environmental Protection trashes a plan for a proposed landfill in Dade City.
The team of experts was assembled by Pasco landowner Bill Blanchard, who opposes the project proposed by Angelo's Recycled Materials.
Angelo's wants to build a 90-acre landfill that collects household garbage. It will sit about a mile-and-a-half from the Green Swamp and the Withlacoochee River. The DEP is expected to decide next week whether to approve or deny permits.
Opponents worry the landfill sits in what they call a sinkhole-prone area, and that as the garbage deteriorates into liquid or leachate, it will leak into the nearby Florida Aquifer and contaminate water supplies from Dade City to Tampa.
Blanchard owns nearly 2,000 acres next to the landfill.
A lobbyist Blanchard hired, attorney Christopher Kise, wrote a cover letter urging the DEP's general counsel to deny the permit because "the applicant can not provide reasonable assurance that sinkhole development will not lead to catastrophic leakage of leachate into the groundwater."
In the report, two geologists and three civil engineers, hired by Blanchard, took turns picking apart the proposed landfill.
They contend soil boring tests conducted by Angelo's revealed detrimental evidence, "all indicative of active, not dormant, sinkhole processes..."
Angelo's project manager, John Arnold, says the company is aware there are paleosinkholes, or ancient sinkholes, on the site but insists they are stable.
"We did over 130 solid borings where we directly investigated for sinkholes," Arnold said. "What we were able to find is there are not active sinks."
From an engineering perspective, the report says, the design of the landfill will drastically raise the risk of sinkhole formation under several integral portions of the landfill facilities, such as leachate tanks, temporary waste storage areas and pipelines.
"Consequently, the Applicant has failed to provide reasonable assurance that sinkholes will not lead to failure of these facilities, thus polluting the groundwater," Kise wrote.
Civil engineer Joseph Fluet is among the experts who helped write the latest report.
Fluet was hired by Angelo's last year as a consultant. At the time he expressed concerns about the design. Fluet went to work for opponents of the project after a disagreement with Angelo's over compensation. He contends the project's design violates landfill rules governed by the Florida Administrative Code.
But DEP spokesperson Pamala Vazquez said the state found no rules violations.
Angelo's plans to install a double-liner along the bottom of the landfill to capture the leachate before it escapes into the environment.
The report says a small sinkhole will cause clogging and failure in the leachate collection system. It goes on to say the liner system will fail and breach if a large sinkhole develops beneath the landfill. That could catastrophic, the report states, and could lead to hundreds of gallons of leachate leaking into the groundwater each day and go undetected for a long time.
A hydrogeological analysis indicates there are many conduits from the surface of the landfill to the Floridan aquifer into Crystal Springs and the Hillsborough and Withlacoochee Rivers.
"This creates real long-term potential for contamination of the Tampa Bay water supply," Kise wrote in his letter to DEP. "The applicant failed to provide reasonable assurance that sinkhole development will not lead to significant pollution of the Florida aquifer and surrounding surface waters."
Arnold said his company's testing found the opposite.
"All of our work has been peer reviewed and experts outside of our project can agree that this is an ideal site," he said.

News Channel 8 reporter Steve Andrews can be reached at (813) 221-5779.

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