THIS JUST IN: After years of ignoring neighbor complaints about gag-inducing odors emanating from Keystone Sanitary Landfill, the state Department of Environmental Protection has finally grown a nose.
In a Tuesday letter to trash barons Louis and Dominick DeNaples, DEP Waste Management Program Manager Roger Bellas wrote that the agency is suspending its “settlement accommodation plan operations,” or SAP, which allowed Keystone to tear the caps off of settled mounds of old garbage and pile new trash on top.
Essentially, DEP granted KSL permission to scratch open old wounds and pack them with new filth. When the eye-watering stench of old rot predictably rode the wind out of the landfill, the agency’s new nose got bent out of shape.
Bellas’ letter links the SAP sections of the landfill to 200-plus odor complaints received since Oct. 1, many confirmed by DEP staff. A Nov. 16 inspection also factored into the decision.
“The DEP has determined that KSL has been unable to maintain overall operational compliance; specifically, with regards to adequately controlling landfill gas odors resulting from activities related to the SAP operations,” Bellas wrote.
TRANSLATION: “We smell it, too.”
Times-Tribune Staff Writer Frank Lesnefsky broke the news of the letter, which was greeted by many landfill neighbors and Friends of Lackawanna — the grassroots group fighting the landfill’s expansion — as a welcome, long overdue acknowledgment by DEP that the landfill stinks beyond its borders.
Sorry to sniff at this “breakthrough,” but according to DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly, the suspension affects less than 10 of the landfill’s sprawling 714 acres in Dunmore and Throop.
This is the third time this year DEP has criticized the landfill for odors. It’s lovely that DEP has finally, officially confirmed what anyone with a working nose has known for years, but let’s not overstate the impact of this so-called “suspension.” It affects a tiny portion of the poisonous property that landfill officials said hasn’t been used for new garbage for “several weeks.”
This is, after all, the same DEP that granted Keystone an unconscionable expansion permit to build “Mount Trashmore” out of 94 million tons of trash over the next four decades. An overdue admission that the landfill stinks means little and misses the big picture, which DEP has raised to an art form.
“I commend (DEP) for acknowledging that the landfill stinks, but that’s not news,” said Pat Clark, a leader of Friends of Lackawanna. FOL was formed in 2014 to oppose the expansion, which it is appealing before the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board.
“It’s a step in the right direction in terms of DEP saying (KSL) is not in compliance, that they put a plan in place and they aren’t following it,” Clark said. Bellas gave Keystone 10 days to submit a plan for correcting the odor problems, an approach Clark said has become routine and is meaningless if the problems persist.
I reached out to landfill consultant Al Magnotta on Friday. He said he read Bellas’ letter but couldn’t discuss Keystone’s plan to answer DEP’s call for correction.
Whatever Keystone does to address the issue at hand, Clark said more and thornier problems are bound to follow, particularly if Mount Trashmore rises over the next 40-plus years.
“I wish (DEP) would zoom out and look at the whole picture,” he said, pointing out that focusing on specific examples — like odor emanating from a portion of the landfill that represents less than 1.5% of its rotten footprint — risks losing sight of the larger, looming catastrophe of allowing a festering wound to grow in the heart of our valley.
“If (KSL) can’t be in compliance now, how will it be any different in the future?” Clark asked. “Combine all these smaller examples and they add up to a big problem. If something this bad can happen on 10 acres, what’s going to happen when something goes bad on the whole site?”
If only DEP would grow a spine and a conscience to go with its new nose, we might never have to know.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, congratulates Roger Bellas on his recent olfactory upgrade. Read his award-winning blog at timestribuneblogs.com/kelly.