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Hernando Today

Making Space For Waste

The county is in a race against time to expand its landfill facility on U.S. 98 north of Brooksville before January 2010.

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By TONY MARRERO

Hernando Today

Published: May 12, 2008

BROOKSVILLE - BROOKSVILLE - From a distance, it could be the foundation of a massive pyramid worthy of an Egyptian king.

The slanted, towering walls of soil covered in a sparse layer of grass reach some 170 feet high. A dusty dirt road runs along one side, pitching ever steeper toward the heavens.

When Scott Harper on Monday steered his Ford pickup up the sandy slant and around a corner near the top, however, it became clear this mound is a testament not to royalty but to a culture's ability to discard.

As garbage trucks dumped their crumpled, colorful loads, one massive bulldozer pushed the trash up the hill while another crunched over it with toothy treads. Buzzards and gulls flocked and feasted. Plastic bags blew like tumbleweeds.

It's the Hernando County landfill on U.S. 98 north of Brooksville — and it is filling up quickly.

Harper, the county's solid waste services manager, got out of his truck and pointed up to the dozers and the trucks. The heavy machinery pushes up the trash in 10-foot-high layers until the mountain reaches 185 feet high. That height is set by federal guidelines.

"One more time, and we're done," he said.

The landfill's current 28-acre section, comprised of two "cells," will reach capacity by January 2010, Harper said.

The county has plans to construct a new 26-acre cell immediately to the west that should provide enough space for another 16 years worth of trash, and is already two years into the design and permitting phase.

There is plenty of room at the landfill, which opened in 1991. The county purchased 246 acres in the 1980s and then secured another 120 acres of former mining land just to the south for future expansion.

The estimated cost of the new cell is $15 million. The county has about $5 million in reserves that could go toward the project, Utilities Director Joe Stapf said. The rest will likely be borrowed.

There is concern, though, that the new cell won't be completed in time and that the county will have to pay to truck its garbage to other landfills in the region.

The county has submitted a design for the cell to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to secure a permit for the project. DEP has asked three times for more information, and the county is currently working with its consultant, Brown and Caldwell Engineering, to prepare information to satisfy the third request, Harper said.

Most of the back-and-forth has been over the question of how the design of the new cell accounts for sinkholes that could open underneath the cell, Stapf said.

Cells are built upon a multi-layered liner of plastic and clay-based cloth that prevents runoff from leeching into the ground. In the existing cells, the garbage-tainted runoff, called leachate, is diverted to a system of pipes, collected in a large tank and trucked off to county stormwater treatment plants.

The new cell will feature a sump where the leachate will collect before being pumped west to a treatment plant on the other side of the Suncoast Parkway.

Crews are using ground penetrating radar and borings to seek out areas that could be susceptible to sinkholes, Harper said. That data is then submitted to DEP for review. Some anomalies have already been found, prompting the department to ask more questions about how the liner would hold up if a sinkhole yawned underneath it.

DEP will "continue to do whatever we can to help them get these issues addressed," said department spokeswoman Pam Vazquez. "The most important thing is that the county understands what we're requiring of them, so we're having continuous conversations."

Once the permit comes in, construction of the new cell could take up to a year, Harper said, "so it's going to be close."

Hanging over the process is the specter of a large hurricane.

A big storm that caused much damage would prompt residents to purge damaged items on a major scale. If that happened, Stapf said, "we'd have a problem."

So the county is enacting a "Plan B," Stapf said, by seeking a modification to the landfill's existing operating permit to allow the county to ship some trash to other landfills in the region to preserve space in the existing cell. Operations in Polk and Lake counties have expressed willingness to work with Hernando, Stapf said.

If all goes well, the county won't have to resort to that plan, and for good reason, Harper said: The cost to ship garbage to one of those landfills would likely be roughly $40 a ton. If the county shipped 300 tons a day for a year, the bill could come to several million dollars, Harper said.

Stapf and Harper acknowledged that the county underestimated the amount of time it would take to secure a permit for the new phase of the landfill. Stapf has been with the county since January, and Harper since August 2006.

The landfill's original 246 acres has space for two more cells that will provide capacity until 2035. The planning for those cells will begin five years before an existing cell reaches capacity, they said.

Residents can do their part by recycling as much of their refuse as possible, Harper said.

Reporter Tony Marrero can be reached at 352-552-5286 or lmarrero@hernandotoday.com.

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