Hurley got more bad news as it scrambles to find a treatment solution for its landfill leachate.
“We have an unlined landfill,” town supervisor Mike Boms explained. “It is capped, but when it rains, the water percolates down through the cap into the trash below there, and whatever chemicals are there are being leached out. And these chemicals are dangerous. They’re very toxic. [There are] three chemicals that we’re looking at. One is PFAS, another one is PFOA, and the other one is 1,4-dioxane.”
Boms predecessor as town supervisor, Melinda McKnight, says Boms would save taxpayers a lot of money if he had the surface drainage system repaired.
An uncovered clay berm collects runoff, which gets pumped into large tanks. Without a cover, the berm acts like a bathtub, she said. Clean water is pumped into tanks containing leachate. A water impermeable membrane with a ten-year warranty that she purchased for the town was never installed.
“None of them understand how the system works,” she said. [Former supervisor Gary] Bellows and [highway superintendent Mike] Shultis knew about the problems, cut corners, and to save money didn’t install the features recommended by the engineers. Penny wise, pound foolish as usual.”
Any landfill capped after 1996 has to undergo leachate collection. Until recently, the town had been using the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA) to pump leachate from holding tanks and take it to the Kingston wastewater treatment plant.
The closed Hurley landfill was declared a state Superfund site. Due to the presence of PFOS and PFOA, Kingston stopped accepting the leachate. No other communities Boms has called will accept it.
It will cost the town $10,000 each time the tanks are pumped and sent to the Passaic Valley wastewater treatment center in New Jersey. And it would cost us about $3000 to send a truck there and back, Boms said.
He called up the state DEC and said, “Now it’s your problem.”
The DEC is collecting samples from the leachate to see whether it meets the requirements to be treated in Kingston.
“I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” that Hurley should put storage tanks on the landfill and fill them up,” Boms. “That’s great for three days. And then what?”
McKnight blamed the situation on poor maintenance and a lack of understanding of how the leachate collection system works. The system is collecting rainwater and snow melt, requiring it to be treated with the rest of the leachate, she explained.
“The town did not maintain the surface drainage system as evidenced by groundhogs living in it, as well as crushed and cracked pipes from careless landscapers,” McKnight said. “That system is supposed to collect any water that runs off the top of the ‘blanket’ which covers the waste mass and send it into the stream. The surface system being broken means that clean rainwater is being collected by the gravity-fed system and mixing with contaminated water.”
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