WE MIGHT GET POISONED, BUT HOW ARE WE TO KNOW?
When a town loses its newspaper, no one knows what’s going on
When we moved to Grove City in the summer of 2021, we noticed signs around town expressing opposition to a “Radioactive Trash Mountain” that was apparently in danger of opening. I asked several locals what was going on, and I couldn’t get any clear details about the proposed Tri-County Landfill or whether it was likely to get approved.
As newcomers to the town, we looked for a local paper to subscribe to, but the only option was an anemic, regional weekly with little to no actual investigative reporting. The town hasn’t had an actual local newspaper since 1965. I didn’t see any stories about the landfill in the regional paper, and when the signs in town slowly disappeared, I figuredthe issue had been resolved.
A doomed cause
That wasn’t, in fact, the case. During the run-up to the most recent township elections, we saw more signs about the landfill proposal. Our neighbor lost his race for township supervisor because, he thought, he’d been unwilling to be more vocal in opposition to the proposed landfill.
He said the township had fought an earlier application that would have allowed the landfill to be built up well over one hundred feet high. This violated zoning requirements for structure heights, and the township took the landfill to court, claiming a landfill is a structure.
The township’s victory meant the landfill could be only forty feet tall, which doesn’t really seem like a mountain. My neighbor wasn’t in favor of the landfill, but he didn’t think the township could do anything to prevent it and didn’t want to waste public money fighting in a doomed cause.
When the Citizens’ Environmental Association of the Slippery Rock Area, a local non-profit that’s leading opposition to the landfill, announced a town meeting in January to give an update on the legal fight, we showed up.
After the state’s Department of Environmental Protection denied the last appeal of the landfill permit, the remaining options to prevent it from opening look pretty bleak. The
nonprofit is making one more appeal to the state Commonwealth court, and this hinges on the landfill’s proximity to the airport.
Of even more concern to residents is the fact that the permit application specifies the landfill intends to accept waste from oil and gas drilling, and such waste has been well documented to have high levels of radioactivity and toxic chemicals. Oilfield waste is, nevertheless, legally defined as nonhazardous by the EPA because of the Bentsen Amendment to the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1980.
There are some restrictions on this waste, but in general it’s lightly regulated and can be disposed of in local landfills.
The risks
What are the risks associated with this waste? Well, it all depends on who you ask. One attendee at the town meeting told everyone, “Just Google ‘bone cancer fracking waste’.” This might not be the best research method, but in the absence of sold, investigative reporting, it’s hard to blame people for falling down internet rabbit holes.
Googling such terms is rather like researching strange symptoms and discovering you probably have some rare and dread disease. But in this case, there’s not a doctor you can find to get a more informed diagnosis.
The University of Pittsburgh and the state Department of Health sponsored a study last year that found no correlation between living near fracking wells and cancer, though it did find higher rates of lymphoma and asthma. But very little research seems to have been done on the effects of living near landfills and contaminated waterways.
And maybe the Tri-County Landfill will be run well. It’s hard to say. It doesn’t bode well, however, that other landfills owned and operated by Edward Vogel have a track record of violations.
And the Pennsylvania DEP has been unable to keep landfills that accept fracking waste from discharging toxic leachate and violating state standards. The result has been pollution flowing down the state’s river and streams.
No one really knows
Some local news companies were present at the town meeting, but they simply don’t have the resources to dig into the details. Most of the people I talk with in town have only a vague idea of what’s going on with the landfill and the broader concerns surrounding fracking waste.
It’s hard to fault them, given the challenges involved in figuring out what exactly is happening and what risks it poses. As Margaret Sullivan argues in “Ghosting the News,” when local newspapers disappear, the result is “less civic engagement, more political polarization, [and] more potential for government corruption.”
In our case, it might also be more radioactive streams, and no one seems to know what the fallout from those might be.