Residents vow to monitor landfill
The Columbus Dispatch
MOUNT GILEAD - The legal battles might be over, but residents downwind and downstream from a future Morrow County landfill are preparing to watch what goes into it and comes out.
"Oh yeah, they'll be under surveillance," Bob Durbin said. "We won't be able to trespass, but they will see a car with someone with binoculars."
Durbin is the general manager and a resident of Candlewood Lake, a gated community in northern Morrow County with 557 homes and 380 campground lots. The community sprang up in 1972 around a man-made, 280-acre lake fed by Whetstone Creek. It is about 3 miles southeast of where the landfill is to be built.
In April 2006, the owners of Columbus-based C&DD Acquisitions prevailed in a three-year battle with Morrow County residents and health officials to obtain an operating license for a 171-acre landfill where trucks and trains will deposit construction and demolition debris, mostly from the East Coast. A license application for a second landfill in the southern part of the county has been put on hold.
A handful of minor permits and licenses are pending, but Steve Schwarzwalder, the Morrow County Board of Health's director of environmental services, said he expects construction will begin within the next year.
Calls to Vance Environmental Services, which holds the operating license, were not returned.
Candlewood Lake residents say the battle is far from over.
"The landfill company says there will be no dust, but the prevailing winds come this way," Durbin said as he steered his pontoon boat along the lake's shore one recent afternoon.
Here and there, new homes and docks were being built. As fluffy white cottonwood seeds drifted past on a breeze from the northwest, Durbin waved to a throng of high-school kids splashing near a dock.
"Local cross-country team," he said. "Their coach brings them here for a camp every summer."
Durbin said residents are concerned about the effects that the landfill will have on property values and quality of life. Candlewood Lake, though begun as a vacation resort, has become a year-round home to nearly 1,600 people, making it the third-largest community in Morrow County, after Mount Gilead and Cardington.
Cindy Dougherty moved to Candlewood Lake from Gahanna less than two years ago. A grandmother of four, Dougherty has joined a group of residents who call themselves "Parents Protecting Children."
On Tuesday, they met with Ohio Environmental Protection Agency Director Chris Korleski and other agency officials to discuss how the landfill will be monitored.
Dougherty thinks the greatest threat to public health will come from lead, arsenic and mercury that could seep into the soil. A pair of 2006 studies commissioned by residents indicated that the earth beneath the landfill site, though laden with clay, is not stable enough to prevent leakage into underground aquifers.
"Our chief concern is the children who will be drinking that stuff," Dougherty said, noting that an elementary school and a high school also are within miles of the landfill site.
Ohio EPA spokeswoman Melissa Fazekas noted that although issued by the Morrow County Board of Health, the landfill's operating license is subject to annual review by the state. "We will not take violations lightly," she said.
