As the County prepares to hire a contractor to repair the 25-year-old cap on the Laytonville landfill, old questions about contaminants are rising to the surface.
A 2020 report found that one of the groundwater wells had detected contamination that triggered extra reporting requirements and a study about how to take corrective action. The landfill is monitored by a network of ten wells, plus gas probes and devices that monitor the depth and pressure of the groundwater. In the first half of 2020, the well on the southeast corner of the site showed increased levels of several elements, including iron, manganese, chloride, calcium, sodium, sulfate and arsenic.
After the reports about the anomalies in the well, the Cahto Tribe, whose rancheria borders the closed dumpsite, initiated government-to-government consultations with the California Environmental Protection Agency, and the county signed an agreement with the tribe about how to conduct the repairs on the cap with tribal input and keep their consultant, Dr. Deitrick McGinnis, apprised of work on the landfill.
McGinnis says two of the three wells he’s working with have shown signs of contamination he suspects are from the historic garbage. He wants to put in a half-dozen more wells to collect more data.
“This is not an inexpensive endeavor,” McGinnis acknowledged. “I think that we’re going to see, at least on this side of things, at least another million dollars spent before we have a good handle on it. Expanding the system could double that price. And then cleaning up landfills, if you get lucky and it isn’t much of a problem, you know, it can only be seven figures. If it goes the other way, you just start putting zeros behind things.” He hastened to add that the project is “very much in the assessment phase right now, so I hate to scare anybody. But it's not ten thousand dollars.” He thinks he could spend half a million dollars on a first phase groundwater assessment, and another half million for soil analysis.
McGinnis said the work has been funded so far mainly by federal grants specific to the Tribe, which has leveraged the funds for more grants from the EPA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Reclamation. The Tribe has also received Environmental Justice funding from the State of California, “which I think speaks loudly to what this problem really means,” McGinnis concluded.
A 2016 report by an Alaska-based firm called Ahtna found soil contaminants that Sandy Karinen, a retired state environmental scientist, thinks merit another look.
“They found hex-chrome, they found arsenic at exceedingly high levels. Arsenic here has been very high, and they found chloroform,” she said. “So what this report said is, you’ve got to do a whole lot more sampling.”
The Rancheria is within the jurisdiction of the Laytonville County Water District, which treats its water to a high standard, according to District Manager Jim Shields.
“That water is perfectly safe to use for all purposes,” said Shields. “We do thousands of tests a year. We do tests we don’t even have to do. We’re not even required by any of our regulatory agencies to test for PCB and hexavalent chromium. We do that on our own. We do tests, on a regular basis, for PCBs and chrome 6. I’ve done that from day one. Why do I do it when we don’t have to do it? I do it because I’m a responsible member of this community. I listen to people. If people have concerns over those issues, I’m going to do what I can to ensure and guarantee that there are not those sorts of contamination risks here. In fact, we just completed our annual PCB and chrome 6 tests. They're very expensive to do, and once again, it came up negative. Especially the test for PCBs. It’s a very broad scale kind of full-gamut test. Never, ever, ever have we ever found any of that in our water.”
Shields says about 20 years ago, he worked with scientists from EPA Region 9 to test ten private wells near the old dump, and found microscopic levels of cattle dip and DDT, a pesticide used by loggers, but nothing he thinks could be attributed to the landfill.
“We continue to test private drinking wells,” he emphasized. “They are the drinking wells that are immediately adjacent to the landfill. There’s an old well on the rez that’s no longer active. It hasn't been active on the rez since 1969, because they’ve been on city water since then. So these wells that we test, and we’re primarily testing them for PCBs and chrome 6, they are literally right next door to the landfill, downslope gradient, so that if there’s anything escaping or migrating off of that landfill, boy, most likely, you’re going to see that stuff in those wells.”
Shields is the longtime editor of the Laytonville Observer and says he kept close track of state and federal investigations into the illegal disposal of hexavalent chromium, or chrome 6, a highly toxic industrial contaminant. In 1996, the City of Willits sued Remco Hydraulics over the improper disposal of toxins used in its chrome-plating and manufacturing business. Shields says testimony by Remco workers and his own personal contacts convinced him that the pollutant was being illegally dumped — just not in Laytonville.
“Their testimony was, no, we dumped all that stuff down here in Willits,” he recalled. “What my friend said, and it made sense, was, why would we load up chrome 6 and haul it 22 miles north to Laytonville? Why would we do that?”
Supervisors John Haschak and Dan Gjerde, who represent Laytonville since post-census redistricting shifted parts of Bell Springs Road and Spyrock to the Fourth District, asked the state to review previous studies and conduct more testing, if it’s warranted. The water district signed on to the county’s request.
Yana Garcia, the Secretary for the California Environmental Protection Agency, wrote the supervisors a letter this month, saying that additional groundwater monitoring locations and an updated inspection plan are part of the landfill renovation that she expects will take about two years.