Red Rock landfill receives maintenance

Published 12:00 am Friday, November 8, 2002

When trucks started rumbling in and out the old Red Rock sanitary landfill, Larry Wilson didn't know what to think.

On Thursday, his curiosity got the best of him and he started calling people. Richard P. Cummings, 1st District, Mower County Commissioner, got a call and so did Bill Buckley, the county's environmental health supervisor.

Wilson, a businessman and property owner near the intersection of Mower County 46 and County 24, was concerned.

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"What are all those trucks doing hauling in and out of the old Red Rock landfill? I thought it was closed," he said.

Wilson and other residents east of the Austin Country Club had endured the long saga of living next to a landfill.

Contaminated wells became the tip of an iceberg of pollution concerns.

The sanitary landfill was an arch-typical "dump," where all the trash and garbage collected in the city of Austin was deposited.

Then, a more enlightened and environmentally-aware society banned such dumps and the state worked to close them and seal the areas from possible pollution threats to neighboring property owners.

The Red Rock sanitary landfill was closed to dumping in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency using the state's Superfund cleanup monies closed the dump, covering the cells of garbage and trash and sealing it with cover dirt for reclamation of the land.

That the landfill was covered with the contents of a demolition landfill at Adams only fueled uneasy feelings among some landowners that more pollution problems could develop.

They haven't, but the sight of trucks coming and going is an unnerving one to nearby residents as Wilson can attest.

Daryl W. Franklin, county planning director and zoning administrator, plus environmental health supervisor Buckley both assured said, "There is no dumping."

Instead, it is the MPCA's effort to address nagging problems leftover from the June 1998 windstorm and heavy rainfalls in the years afterwards.

Mother Nature has taken its toll on the man-made buttresses designed to protect all.

"Actually, we thought it would be a quick and dirty repair job to replace rip-rap, but it became something else," said Don Abrams, a Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman.

According to Abrams, Borneke Construction Company of Janesville was awarded a contract to correct ponding of storm water in the southeast corner of the landfill site.

"After a number of years, the garbage in a landfill settles and levels out and this took away some of the slope we had constructed at the site when it was closed, causing the ponding of storm water," Abrams said.

Ulland Bros., Inc. was hired by the Janesville contractor to deliver loads of fill to the site. Abrams assured all, "It's clean dirt."

As a matter of fact, the fill material is coming from a site between the intersections of Mower County CSAH No. 3 and 10th Drive Southeast, where "Bud" Johnson is developing land into a residential development.

Meanwhile, a sedimentation pond on the north end of the landfill site also developed problems due to unanticipated weather events.

According to Abrams, the sedimentation pond was designed to collect storm water that would then drain into Dobbins Creek.

However, the strong winds and intense rain dislodged the limestone rip-rap forming two channels engineers thought could handle the high-velocity runoff.

Instead, the limestone rip-rap broke away and tumbled into the sedimentation pond.

"We decided we had to fix it and fix it right," said Abrams. "That's why a project that was only expected to last a couple of days last week has lasted so long."

Abrams credited the MPCA's intense three-times a year sampling of monitoring wells, the sedimentation pond and Dobbins Creek, plus three on-site inspections will helping the MPCA remain proactive to possible problems at the landfill site.

The work is expected to end today.

Lee Bonorden can be contacted at 434-2232 or by e-mail at lee.bonorden@austindailyherald.com