By ops@our-hometown.com | on March 16, 2022

In response to months of odor complaints alleging hydrogen sulfide emissions from the Skinquarter Landfill, the county, landfill management and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality are increasing accountability to better address a lingering and confounding issue.

Last week, Matoaca District Supervisor Kevin Carroll hosted a community meeting with Skinquarter site manager David Valdez and DEQ land protection manager Shawn Weimer to hear and address concerns from Moseley residents who have alleged for more than a year that the smell emanating from the landfill – a construction and debris public waste site that does not accept municipal solid waste – is insufferable, making their homes untenable at times, often in the middle of the night.

The gas, described as a rotten egg odor, has been identified as hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which results from the decomposition of gypsum, the material in drywall.

A Freedom of Information Act request to the DEQ returned 63 complaints – including some from agency staff driving past the facility – against the landfill from July 19, 2021, to Feb. 18; all but two of them were odor-related.

The March 8 community meeting at the CTC @ Hull followed a warning letter from the DEQ on March 3 mandating an odor-management plan that the site has 90 days to install on the heels of a Feb. 7 inspection.

The next evening, on March 9, County Administrator Joe Casey presented an action plan at the Board of Supervisors’ monthly meeting, aimed at helping to keep the public informed about remediation efforts, track complaints and facilitate off-site monitoring in light of Valdez agreeing to install monitoring systems on residents’ private property free of charge.

In the same vein, Valdez made an open invitation to the public to visit the landfill, which is owned by WB Waste Solutions, and learn more about the mitigations and site operations. The Observer accepted this invitation, and walked the site to learn more last Friday with Matoaca Planning Commissioner Tom Owens, on the condition from Valdez that recording and camera devices were not allowed.

Over the course of the 90 minutes on a clear afternoon walking the perimeter of the two cells comprising the landfill’s current operations, perhaps most striking was the lack of odor.

Valdez carried with him an H2S detection system – the same one he agreed to lend nearby residents – accompanied by his 1-year-old Boston Terrier, Nacho, who tagged along off-leash. He explained that subjectively, the strongest odors seem to be between periods of rain, and the “smell corner” is along the west side of the site, a few hundred yards away from the 500,000 leachate tank – the mechanism that collects the waste water from inside the landfill cells. Inside the office, Valdez had carefully kept records of the loads entering his site – an average of 33 trucks per day in February.

“I think they’re giving their best effort,” Owens said. “But I think there’s a piece of the puzzle missing somewhere. And we’ve got to figure out what that piece of the puzzle is.”

The contrast is striking when juxtaposed with the dozens of complaints from residents in the area, many of whom feel adequate steps have not been taken to address the ongoing issue, but all characterize it similarly: “The smell travels like a putrid pocket of stink,” notes one email to a site inspector with the DEQ, Doug Masini.

And until last week, the question of who or what agency has oversight and enforcement authority to help make meaningful changes was also an issue. Under state law, the DEQ has regulatory authority over the landfill; the county is bound to inspecting the site for compliance with its 1988 zoning conditions. At the Feb. 23 board meeting, Weimer told supervisors that the agency is severely hamstrung with only two inspectors for the Piedmont Region, which includes 80 waste-management facilities across 30 municipalities.

In part, that’s why Casey introduced the idea of entering a memorandum of understanding allowing the county to act as an agent of the DEQ to “spend the time and attention that is needed” on March 9.

Matoaca supervisor Kevin Carroll (left) landfill manager David Valdez (center) and Shawn Weimer (right) of the state DEQ fielded Moseley residents’ questions and concerns about the Skinquarter Landfill at a March 8 community meeting at CTC @ Hull. ASH DANIEL

Carroll, who made no bones about having consulted with County Attorney Jeff Mincks about potential paths forward should the odor not be remediated at the March 8 community meeting, said by phone he has also asked staff to look into hiring a third-party consultant to do testing in the area on and off site.

“I think sometimes it depends on what time of day it is whether or not you smell it,” Carroll said. “Our complaints – they come in all different times of the day, but some of them are really early morning. And so, you know, we know that if it is that type of gas, it’s heavier than air, so it’s going to hug the ground and the question is: Is it building up overnight, and concentrating and then moving off site?”

And while remediation efforts are certainly in play, the process has been ongoing for more than a year, and the March 3 warning letter is not Skinquarter’s first.

On May 24, 2021, the DEQ issued a warning outlining three violations stemming from a March 29 Focused Compliance Inspection and a May 3 Complaint Investigation of the landfill.

The “factual observations” included: “The facility General Manager indicated that Daily, Weekly, and Monthly site inspections, as detailed within the current Operations Manual, are not performed and documented;” “no landfill gas odors were detected off-site but were noted on-site during both inspections along the western edge of Cell 2, in the form of H2S gas odors;” “the top deck and fluff layer in Cell 2 was not covered as required,” and “the work-face appeared to be larger than practicable for the amount of machinery and manpower due to the sheer volume of uncovered waste.”

In a June 21, 2021, response letter, Valdez denied or disagreed with each of the aforementioned violations.

On Sep. 14, in response to a request from Weimer, Valdez outlined measures the facility is taking to mitigate the odor complaints received by the DEQ, which included daily assurance that the leachate collection system clean-outs – to collect water that has percolated through a solid mass – are capped and any divots or sparsely covered areas on the landfill are sealed and weekly cover is applied.

He stated that an odor log is in place to record the presence or absence of odor in conjunction with current weather conditions, and that the site has engaged with LaBella to perform hydrogen sulfide detection testing off site. At that writing, two tests had been performed, and H2S was detected on-site only.

In an Aug. 17, 2021, letter from LaBella, the company outlined findings from a gas investigation targeting hydrogen sulfide on Aug. 13 stating that H2S was noted along the western side of the landfill, in a clean-out on the southwestern side of the landfill and at its highest concentration downwind of the active working face at the northeastern corner of the lined waste footprint. The report noted that compared to the OSHA standards for permissible exposure limits (PEL), none of the detected levels exceeded the ceiling or max peak.

“It should also be noted that any raw gas emitting from the landfill comes into contact with the atmosphere, it is quickly dispersed, reducing the concentrations significantly before reaching onsite Skinquarter personnel or offsite residents,” the document, signed by Hillary Elder, a project consultant, states. “This demonstrates that there is no apparent threat to human health.”

Lastly, in his September email to Weimer, Valdez wrote that “we are installing a gas management system that will extract landfill gas with a blower from the clean-outs on the western edge of cells 1&2 and discharging it through a bio-filter,” Valdez wrote. “System will be operational by the end of September.”

By phone, Valdez said Skinquarter began piloting the system in October and November, and has been running them “pretty regularly” since late December, typically from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.

But a DEQ follow-up note to a Jan. 23 odor complaint states: “Requested update from DV,” according to the documents obtained by FOIA. “DV responded and indicated the permeate unit was delayed and no firm date of completion could be given but updates will be [sent] when able. He indicated the temp unit was operating intermittently.”

In February, in response to another odor complaint alleging sewage odors, the follow-up note states: “I inspected Skinquarter Landfill last Monday, February 7th. I detected H2S odors and odors associated with wood processing facilities, Yardworks, but no hint of sewage odors. I will investigate.”

Following that Feb. 7 inspection, the DEQ issued Valdez another warning letter with the requirement for an odor management plan on March 3. Asked whether that was in response to H2S odors detected on-site, Valdez said by phone that there was no H2S detected on site during that visit, but there was an odor that he did not believe was specified in writing.

“So we did receive notification from DEQ that the site would be subject to an odor management plan,” Valdez said, adding that some of the components are already in the works and “we’re hoping to have that plan approved sooner than the 90 days.”

Additionally, he says he would like to install a citizens’ panel of three to five residents to help increase transparency about ongoing efforts and the first monitoring system went out to a resident’s property to test for H2S gas last week.

The latter is a result of resident Carol Cornwall imploring the site to “collect valid data” at last week’s community meeting.

“We have a mismatch here. … I hear a current of discount to what the community is experiencing, and that’s bothersome because we live here, you don’t,” Cornwall said.

She went on to ask if altitude was a consideration when testing for gas levels in the surrounding areas, noting that those who live further out west are at a slightly lower altitude and if the gas migrates and sinks at night, it isn’t going to register at one of the five monitoring stations in the near vicinity of the site.

“In the middle of the night, if you have to let one of the dogs out to go to the bathroom, wear a gas mask, because it is horrible,” she said. “So I invite you to come out there, not just at 2 o’clock in the afternoon or 8 o’clock in the morning when the sun’s coming up and the humidity conditions, air conditions are different, wind conditions are different; I invite you to come out there when residents are at home.”

Carroll, too, said that data collection is a top priority moving forward.

“But I still think that we need to be looking at the complaints where they’re coming in off-site to determine what odor is that people picking up on,” he said, “And, you know, could there be an outside chance it’s coming from somewhere else, there always could be – the question is, quite frankly, that prior to the landfill coming into existence out there, these complaints didn’t occur?” ¦

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