Hearing set over LR landfill’s tainting of groundwater

A Little Rock landfill that faced public criticism several years ago for odors is the subject of corrective action for contaminating groundwater in the city.

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality will hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. April 18 at the department’s headquarters in North Little Rock before determining what the corrective action will be.

BFI Landfill, on Mabelvale Pike near where it crosses Fourche Creek, has been closed since 2013. Test results from that year indicated high levels of arsenic and cobalt in groundwater on site that have held steady since then, according to department records.

The contamination was likely caused by landfill gas, which is created by a landfill and contributes to the release of metals from soil into groundwater, department spokesman Kelly Robinson said in an email to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The company, which declined to make anyone available for an interview, said the contamination does not spread beyond the landfill property.

The department, which also declined to make anyone available for an interview, said it had not studied whether the contamination affected Fourche Creek.

Fourche Creek is a 20-milelong recreational creek in south Little Rock that is often filled with garbage from storm drains throughout the city and other illicit dumping.

The department noted two contaminated sites on the landfill’s property.

“There are no residents close to the landfill; therefore no one should currently be impacted by this groundwater contamination,” Robinson said in her email.

City residents do not get their drinking water from groundwater; Central Arkansas Water supplies water from Lake Maumelle to city residents.

Suggested corrective action includes upgrades to gas collection and control, treatment in specially constructed wetlands, and annual monitoring.

Brad Kiesling, a spokesman for BFI, said the company is already working to upgrade the landfill’s flare, which destroys landfill gas. It’s also working to improve pumps that help remove landfill gas, he wrote in an email to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

In 2009, residents near the landfill began complaining about odors coming from the landfill after it began accepting waste from natural gas drilling sites in the Fayetteville Shale. Environmental officials declined to shut down the landfill in 2010, and the landfill closed when its permit expired in 2013.