“For most of [the decommissioned, uninvestigated] sites, 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.”
– Burlington city manager Bob Patterson
The decommissioned landfills that the state auditor’s office has identified in Alamance County are not exactly a secret to the local officials who’ve lived and worked alongside these facilities for decades. Nor are they necessarily a riddle wrapped in a mystery to the state regulators who administer defunct landfills for the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality.
The sites that the auditor’s office places in Burlington are generally well known to city manager Bob Patterson. In fact, Patterson acknowledges that, at one time or another, the city has used five of these six locations to dispose of its municipal waste.
Patterson notes that one site, which is known to the auditor’s office as the “South Mebane Street Landfill,” served as the city’s primary dump until 1958. This site, which is currently located on the grounds of Burlington’s City Park, has been turfed over and repurposed as ballfields since the landfill’s demise. Patterson added that the city recently tested the property for lead contamination before it relocated a children’s playground to the vicinity.
After this landfill closure some 68 years ago, the city took its waste to a succession of sites along Durham Street Extension, Hanover Road, and Stone Quarry Road. Then, in 1969, the city began its decade-long utilization of another site along Anthony Road that’s known to the state auditor’s office as the “Old City of Burlington Solid Waste Disposal” facility.
Although the state auditor includes this site in its inventory of “uninvestigated” landfills, Patterson acknowledges that the city has spent the past several years working with state regulators to identify any potential hazards in this location.
“We’ve done geophysical surveys and ground water monitoring,” he recalled in an interview this week, “and this would be the preliminary stage in determining if any remediation will be required.”
The DEQ, for its part, acknowledges that an “investigation” is now underway along Anthony Road. This, in fact, is the site’s latest status according to the agency’s website, which contains reams of data on former waste disposal locations across North Carolina.
The DEQ’s website, which appears to be more up-to-date than the information in the state auditor’s report, reveals that investigations have also begun at Burlington’s Hanover Road landfill and a so-called “Elon College Landfill” along Amick Road outside of Elon’s municipal limits. In both cases, the state auditor’s report has classified these locations as “uninvestigated.”
The DEQ has also assembled an archive of records for each of the state’s former landfills. These online troves chronicle activities like well sampling and development censuses that have occurred in the vicinity of defunct dumps even if the sites, themselves, remain unassessed.
Information on the DEQ’s website goes on to confirm the state auditor’s account that no further regulatory action is needed at a site in Gibsonville dubbed “Gibsonville Properties.” Meanwhile, the agency notes that there’s regulatory “action pending” at the other eight sites in Alamance County. This phrase appears to be a departmental euphemism that bears out the state auditor’s assertion that these sites remain “uninvestigated.”
According to the DEQ, there is “activity pending” at Burlington’s Durham Street and Stone Quarry Road landfills, the South Mebane Street Landfill within Burlington’s City Park, a site called “Alamance Garbage Service” that lies beyond Burlington’s northern border, the “Mebane Dump” along Corrigidor Road, and at sites in Graham along Cooper Road, Porter Avenue, and Goley Street.
