Reader’s Viewpoint: Record shows that Countywide Landfill officials utterly lack credibility
To the Editor:
It is perplexing, given the track records involved, that new Ohio EPA Director Chris Korleski would hand a decision as momentous as the renewal of Countywide landfill’s permit to operate over to a local bureaucrat, the Stark County Health Department commissioner, where this landfill’s problems have been ignored.
With each catastrophe, Countywide manager Tim Vandersall assures us all is well. The record shows Vandersall utterly lacks credibility. The wretched odors emanating from Countywide have not been, as characterized in the media, a problem for the last year. They have been around for years. But the same county health department and OEPA have fiddled while Rome – and Countywide – burned.
In sworn testimony before the Pike Township Board of Zoning Appeals in June and July of 2004 at Sandy Valley High School, Countywide’s “experts” refuted complaints about odors, leachate, etc. Vandersall addressed the odor problem, long-standing even then, by producing an expert from the Stark Health Department who testified the odors came from road kill.
Does Vandersall stand by the testimony that decaying road kill was the source of the odors? Why should anyone believe his statements about the source of odors now?
He also still denies that, in the face of credible evidence and testimony from disinterested experts, Countywide is on fire. Is there a reason that reasonable people should believe him? But now he will be in discussions with Stark County’s Health Department chief on saving Countywide’s permit to operate by agreeing to stipulations from Korleski that Vandersall will have to more strictly monitor the landfill fires he says don’t exist. The frustration of Tuscarawas County commissioners Kerry Metzger and Chris Abbuhl, expressed in a March 1 story, is justified.
That same article noted Countywide received Ohio EPA approval in 1998 to recirculate leachate throughout the landfill, which violated an agreement with Club 3000 that stipulated leachate be removed and treated off-site. The landfill crowd assured us this would efficiently soak the leachate into the landfill contents. Now we know the landfill “experts” also dumped the leachate on aluminum dross widely suspected of being the source of the fires and odors for which Countywide is infamous.
What other chemical reactions can we expect from other products Countywide accepts, such as the tankers of liquid brought in, mixed with auto fluff to reach the consistency of Jell-O and classified “solid” waste? What chemicals are these? Why does the Ohio EPA allow this circus to continue? Whether it is aluminum dross and leachate, atomic dirt, or 1,000 pounds of lead, we can expect Vandersall’s assurances of no problem.
Dallas Charton, Bolivar
