Landfill’s Fallout Unsettling to Residents

If Evelyn and Joe Alemanni are upset by what’s going on around them these days in their rural Elfin Forest neighborhood west of Escondido, well, they haven’t seen nuthin’ yet.

The couple thought they had moved to just this side of Eden last year when they left their Point Loma house and its postage stamp-size lot for their hilltop ranch house on a 5 1/2-acre spread. The view from poolside takes in some of North County’s rolling hills, trees and a neighborhood sprinkled with half-million-dollar estates, as well as horse ranches and nurseries. The Alemannis’ three basset hounds roam freely, and zucchini in her garden grow the size of gunboats.

But just one thing, they asked the real estate agent who sold them the house last year: What about that landfill over there, to the west?

“We were told it wouldn’t be a problem, that it would be closed in a couple of years,� Evelyn Alemanni said the other day.

Hardly.

Since June, the Alemannis claim, they and their neighbors have been powdered, almost daily, by a fine dust, as a county-hired contractor dynamites one of the last reaches of the San Marcos landfill to make room for more garbage.

The company was hired to dig a 150-foot-deep hole on the site--creating the final man-made canyon and completing the original plan of 1979, when the landfill opened. The 1 million cubic yards of excavated granite rocks and gravel are being stockpiled on the site, to be pushed back onto the garbage as earthen cover when the trash reaches the rim.

The operation is causing the Alemannis grief. The dynamited dust settles in their pool, Evelyn Alemanni maintains, turning the water not dark but a milky white. She says she’s spending $20 a week on pool chemicals to clear the water.

The silica settles inside the computers and laser printers in their home office, where they run their computer software company, she said. The equipment is covered when not used, but she still has to blow the dust from the innards.

Not to mention the dust on the furniture and the dust in the curtains. The dust is getting into, well, everything.

“There’s never a warning so you can close your windows,� she said. “You hear a resonant boom, sometimes two or three times a day; the house shakes like a small earthquake and, in seconds, the dust is in the air and floating our way.�

The canyon being excavated is only about three-quarters of a mile away from the couple’s home, and the prevailing breeze brings the dust directly overhead.

The county’s Air Pollution Control District, which monitors such things as dust emissions into the air, has received complaints from four nearby residents about the dust and has sent out an inspector 20 times to check the excavation work, said APCD spokesman Bob Gogin.

“At first, the contractor wasn’t wetting the material sufficiently to keep the dust down, but he responded immediately� after the APCD’s inspection, Gogin said.

Still, inspectors weren’t able to make a connection between the landfill work and the dust settling on nearby homes, he said. “You have to be able to establish a visible emission for more than three minutes to determine if it’s affecting another property,� Gogin said. “But when we watched, the dust dissipated before three minutes were up. We found dust at the homes, but we weren’t able to identify that it was dust that came from the (landfill) site. We couldn’t make the direct connection.�

Alemanni, while acknowledging that she lives in a dusty neighborhood to begin with, said the problem got significantly worse in June, when the excavation began.

In any event, the short-term project is scheduled to be completed later this month.

That’s the good news. But here comes the bad news, at least for Elfin Forest residents.

The landfill, which originally was supposed to accommodate North County’s trash until 1999, has filled up faster than expected and is now expected to reach capacity in 1991 because of the growth in North County.

Compounding the problem was the fact that the county hoped a facility in Carlsbad would shred much of the garbage, reducing the amount of volume the trash would take. But that facility didn’t work and was closed down.

The landfill is the primary recipient of North County’s garbage--which now amounts to more than a million tons a year. There are smaller landfills near Ramona and Borrego Springs, used by trash haulers serving the less-populated northern stretches of East County.

The county is scurrying about, looking for another site for a new landfill, and is studying half-a-dozen or so candidates to eventually replace the San Marcos landfill. At every site, neighbors are protesting: Not in our back yard!

But a new landfill, wherever it is situated, won’t open before 1994 at best, given all the environmental studies, engineering reports and public hearings that must be conducted, followed by the actual site preparation. So, county officials say, they’re going to have to expand San Marcos beyond the original design limits to handle trash for an additional three or four years at least.

And if the long-proposed trash-to-energy processing plant and recycling center is ever constructed next to the garbage dump, the San Marcos landfill will have to be expanded to accommodate the ash and those materials that can’t be burned or recycled.

So now, the Alemannis wonder how much dust will be exploded into the air in the next year or two--and how much higher the trash will grow.

Currently, the 200-acre landfill has trash stacked more than 200 feet deep. The elevation at landfill floor is 520 feet above sea level; trash now is stacked to an elevation of 750 feet.

The county is considering a number of proposals to expand the landfill, either by taking in a larger area, by stacking the trash still higher or a combination of the two options, said Jim Magee, the principal civil engineer for the county Department of Public Works’ solid-waste division.

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider the options, and maybe choose one, when it meets Dec. 12.

The least extreme option would increase the landfill’s life span an additional three years.

The most extreme option--one that would add 12 years or so to the landfill’s usefulness--calls for the landfill to be expanded both to the southwest and to two privately owned parcels to the north of the existing site, alongside a hill that tops at 970 feet, Magee said. That hill is the tallest in the area near the landfill, and the trash could be stacked to within a few feet of the top of the hill’s ridgeline.

Magee says the landfill’s trash couldn’t be seen from the south because it would be hidden by the hill itself. But most Elfin Forest residents live east of the landfill, and to them the expansion would create a new, artificial ridgeline of garbage, albeit covered with dirt, cutting perpendicularly across their view westward down the valley.

That thought sends shudders down Evelyn Alemanni’s spine, as she looks to the west toward the landfill from her back yard.

“Sunset would come a half hour earlier for us,� she said wryly.