Location
Arlington, Virginia
Date
14 Aug 2008, 2:15pm - 4:00pm
Abstract
During the past 30 years the author has been involved in a number of landfill closure projects. No two were ever the same, and all were interesting. Three closure projects stand out for the level of effort involved, the rigor of regulatory review, and the issues that occurred during construction, a number of which could have been headed off during design. One site was a major hazardous waste disposal facility and Superfund site; the second, the Fresno Sanitary Landfill, was the oldest sanitary landfill for municipal solid waste in the United States, having opened in 1937 and is also a Superfund site; and the third the San Marcos Landfill in San Diego County underwent final closure with a monolithic evapotranspirative cover composed of blended soils and planted with native plants under a strict court ordered revegetation plan. All three facilities have now undergone final closure and are performing satisfactorily. However, in hindsight there are lessons to be learned and there could have been significant cost savings both in design and in construction.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
6th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2008 Missouri University of Science and Technology, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Dunn, R. Jeffrey, "Lessons Learned from Closing Three Major Landfills – the Devil Really is in the Details" (2008). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 2.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/6icchge/session07b/2
Lessons Learned from Closing Three Major Landfills – the Devil Really is in the Details
Arlington, Virginia
During the past 30 years the author has been involved in a number of landfill closure projects. No two were ever the same, and all were interesting. Three closure projects stand out for the level of effort involved, the rigor of regulatory review, and the issues that occurred during construction, a number of which could have been headed off during design. One site was a major hazardous waste disposal facility and Superfund site; the second, the Fresno Sanitary Landfill, was the oldest sanitary landfill for municipal solid waste in the United States, having opened in 1937 and is also a Superfund site; and the third the San Marcos Landfill in San Diego County underwent final closure with a monolithic evapotranspirative cover composed of blended soils and planted with native plants under a strict court ordered revegetation plan. All three facilities have now undergone final closure and are performing satisfactorily. However, in hindsight there are lessons to be learned and there could have been significant cost savings both in design and in construction.
