Resounding “No” to N.C. Landfill at City Meeting
Aug. 19–CHESAPEAKE — It was a case of preaching to the choir.
Speaker after speaker took the lectern Thursday night and told the Chesapeake City Council that they support its efforts to stop a 490-acre landfill from being built just over the city limits in North Carolina.
Chesapeake resident Linda Price King, who said she was a former executive director of a non profit that helped communities fight landfills, called the one that Black Bear Disposal LLC wants to build in northern Camden County a “leaky bucket” because there is no landfill that will not leak.
“They cannot monitor completely for illegal wastes,” she said.
A law firm hired by Chesapeake gave a presentation during the meeting, laying out why the proposed landfill would not be a good thing for the city or other municipalities in the Northwest River Watershed.
If the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources gives Black Bear Disposal the go-ahead, the site would be allowed to accept up to 10,000 tons of garbage 308 days a year from states east of the Mississippi, according to the law firm representing the city.
City officials say the landfill would pose a possible public health hazard and environmental threat to the watershed, which supplies 60 percent of Chesapeake residents with water. They are concerned that the trash trucks, heading to the landfill, would worsen traffic congestion through the Dominion Boulevard corridor.
City Councilman Pete Burkhimer called the landfill “Dumpzilla,” questioned the intelligence of putting a waste disposal site in the middle of a swamp and accused Black Bear of wanting to commit a “heinous act.”
Raleigh, N.C.-based Waste Industries USA Inc., Black Bear’s parent company, has disputed what the city has said about the landfill having a negative effect on water and air quality and traffic. A company official said after the meeting that the landfill would not have a negative impact on the drinking water of Chesapeake.
Located just off U.S. 17 less than a mile away from the Dismal Swamp Canal, the site would be allowed to reach a maximum height of 280 feet when full, taller than Dominion Tower in Norfolk.
Waste Industry officials said landfills in Sussex County and in Hampton have height ceilings of more than 300 feet.
Waste Industry officials have said the site would be engineered to prevent storm water runoff from entering the Northwest River Watershed or contaminating groundwater.
Black Bear has not received any permits from North Carolina. The state is requiring the parent company to prove that it has solid financial backing before it is allowed to build what would become the largest private landfill in North Carolina.
The city calculates that some 500 20-ton tractor-trailer trucks full of landfill fodder on their way to North Carolina would tie up traffic through the Dominion Boulevard corridor and U.S. 17 as well as damage roads and the Dominion Steel Bridge.
Waste Industries has contended that Chesapeake is exaggerating the effect the trucks would have on the city. Company officials have said that the average amount of trash headed to the landfill would be much lower, more along the lines of 4,000 tons that will be carried by 200 to 250 trucks.
Chesapeake Mayor Dalton S. Edge ended the meeting by saying the possibility of landfill runoff contaminating the Northwest River and the city’s drinking water keeps him awake at night.
“A road can be patched, a bridge can be replaced,” he said, “but once this runoff is in the groundwater, or the Chesapeake Bay, or the Currituck Sound, it can never be removed.”
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