Gunk Fouls Trail At Park

By Jon Rutter

jrutter@lnpnews.com

A local environmental consultant tested toxic leachate oozing out of Lancaster County Central Park last week.

Prognosis? Murky.

Deb Werner, who handles public relations for the Department of Parks and Recreation, said she had no information on the study conducted by GemChem Inc., an environmental and waste disposal consultant in Lititz.

The leachate, which seeps up in several places from a 1960s landfill under the park, is analyzed every year, she said.

GemChem officials could not be reached for comment Friday. Both James Hackett, the parks director, and Paul Weiss, the assistant director, were also out of the office.

The former Lancaster County Sanitary Landfill, which underlies 25 to 30 acres of the park, was closed in 1968. According to newspaper records, demolition debris and dry-cleaning waste were discarded there.

Rainwater has percolated down through the unlined landfill for decades. The leakage was reported to be stabilizing more than 15 years ago, but the goop has never stopped working to the surface.

At the biggest leachate site, along the old CVA Trail on the Conestoga River, water trickles from a rock cleft and eventually fans out into the undergrowth. A vegetation-free area extends for about 25 feet across the embankment.

The ground is coated with orange gunk and clotted here and there with puffs of foam. The air is tinged with a faint oily smell. The water flows directly into the Conestoga.

The portion of the trail containing the site has long been posted with a warning sign.

This area may be contaminated beyond safe limits, the sign reads. It lists a host of pollutants that might be present at various levels, including iron, nickel, mercury, zinc, arsenic, chloroethane and benzene.

Benzene is a known carcinogen; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set the drinking water contamination goal for the substance at zero.

The tracks of people – and deer “-still show up clearly on the posted path.

According to newspaper files, concern over the contamination of at least six sites spurred the EPA to investigate twice, in 1985 and 1988.The government later cut the property from a list of possible Superfund cleanup sites.

The issue surfaced again in 1993 when a pet chihuahua was euthanized after it ingested some of the goop and began acting strangely. But nobody ever proved that leachates poisoned the dog.

Jim Warner, executive director of the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority, said leachates are an old story with old landfills.

There were no environmental safeguards, he said. Still, he noted, over many years, the sites do tend to flush themselves clean.

Warner said the parks staff has not recently contacted LCSWMA about leachates, he said. It’s an issue that comes up every six or seven years.

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