A report from North Carolina’s state auditor contends that Alamance County is home to 11 decommissioned landfills that have never been investigated to determine what potential hazards they may contain.
These 11 locations are a mere fraction of the 534 defunct dumps across North Carolina that, according to the office of state auditor Dave Boliek, have not been assessed by the state since they suspended their operations more than four decades ago.
The state’s apparent ignorance of these sites is, in some cases, contradicted by data that’s available online from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) [See Separate Story in this Edition:https://alamancenews.com/state-auditors-uninvestigated-landfills-are-no-mystery-to-local-officials-deq/]
The auditor’s office has nevertheless reached its unflattering conclusion based on a performance audit of the 19-year-old program that’s tasked with overseeing old landfills which predate current state regulations.
This Pre-Regulatory Landfill Program was launched by the N.C. Division of Waste Management in 2007 to identify, assess, and clean up the patchwork of waste disposal sites that operated throughout North Carolina before the state began to regulate these facilities in 1983. This program, which is currently under the aegis of the DEQ, has pinpointed a total of 688 pre-regulatory landfills since its creation.
The state auditor’s office nevertheless asserts that the program has only managed to explore a fifth of these sites for their potential hazards.
“For most of those sites,” the auditor’s office added in a news release that it released alongside the report on Monday, “the state does not yet know what contamination may be present, whether it has spread to nearby properties or water supplies, or whether current conditions pose a risk to nearby residents.”
The auditor’s office relies on data that was current as of June 30, 2025 to reach its conclusions about the state’s 688 pre-regulatory landfills. According to this information, there are 37 sites, including one in Alamance County, which have received a clean bill of health and are now deemed to require “no further action.” The auditor’s report identifies the one Alamance County site in this category as “Gibsonville Properties.”
In poring over the rest of these sites, the state auditor’s office has paid special attention to the prioritization ratings that they’ve received from program’s administrators. According to the auditor’s report, 21 locations have not been prioritized due to problems with location data, while one former landfill has shed its prioritization rating because it recently went through remediation.
The state auditor’s office goes on to enumerate the remaining 629 decommissioned facilities in the same order of priority that they’ve received from the program’s administrator. This prioritized list includes the 11 unexplored sites within Alamance County. The highest rated of these, with a ranking of 89th in the state, is the so-called “Hanover Road Landfill” in Burlington.
The county’s largest municipality is also reportedly home to five more shuttered sites, which are identified as the South Mebane Street, Durham Street, and Stone Quarry Road landfills, “Alamance Garbage Service,” and the “Old City of Burlington Solid Waste Disposal” facility.
Meanwhile, Graham appears as the locus of three other sites, which are described as the “Porter Avenue Landfill,” the “Civic Center Area,” and “Graham Disposal.” The remaining two entries in Alamance County are the “Mebane Dump” and the “Elon College Landfill on Amick Road.”
The state auditor’s office insists that it’s unclear what dangers may lurk beneath these 11 sites and the 523 others that remain uninvestigated across North Carolina. According to the auditor’s report, the potential for lingering hazards is borne out by discoveries made at the 97 sites which have been investigated. As a case in point, the report observes that 23 of these locations had methane concentrations with a better than 5 percent chance of exploding.
The auditor’s report notes that about 84 percent of the state’s pre-regulatory landfills lie within 1,000 feet of “vulnerable” features, such as homes, churches, daycares, schools, and potable wells.
The report goes on to implicate two factors for preventing the state from getting a better handle on the potential hazards in these locations.
The auditor’s office identifies the program’s first obstacle as a shortage of funding, which comes from a special tax that the state tacks onto every ton of waste that enters a landfill currently in operation.
According to the auditor’s report, this surcharge has raised an average of $12.1 million a year for the program’s activities. Yet, with the decontamination cost for a single landfill hovering at about $1.9 million, the auditor’s office predicts that it would take something on the order of 99 years to remediate all of the state’s unmonitored sites.
Another challenge facing the program is the limited access that the state and its contractors have to many of the retired garbage repositories on the list. According to the auditor’s office, 78 percent of these locations are privately owned and the program’s administrators have little legal authority to demand access in order to these inspect or decontaminate their grounds.
In the hope of improving the program’s performance, the auditor’s office recommends that its administrators look for new sources of revenue while fine tuning the procedures they use to prioritize sites. The report also calls on the General Assembly and the program’s own legal counsel to address the problems with access that have hamstrung this statewide initiative.
