By Gary Andes
You can send your odor notices or complaints to me at this email address, ANDES.Gary@deq.state.or.us I would also suggest you send them to the manager of the Riverbend Landfill, George Duvendack, at gduvendack@wm.com so that he is simultaneously aware of the odor situations and can investigate them more immediately than I might be able to.
Information you should provide us would be: date and time of odor (eg.,2/10/09 from 8:30 am to 10:30 am), location of the odor (eg., 17000 SW Highway 18, 700 McCabe Chapel Road, or Home Depot store in West McMinnville), intensity of the odor on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the worst (this I know will be subjective for each individual but assume 1 is just barely noticeable and 10 is making you nauseous).
I have a similar odor reporting system set up for the Coffin Butte Landfill near Corvallis. Hopefully, such a system will allow for determination of what at the landfill might be causing a particular odor at any point in time. But please remember that any landfill will always have some odor no matter how hard they try to avoid it and no matter how good their gas collection and destruction system is.
1 comments:
Here is the letter I sent to Gary Andes, 2-11-09:
Dear Mr. Andes,
Thank you for sending your email address to those of us who live in the neighborhood of Riverbend Landfill.
My home is visible from the top of the landfill, but as we are tucked into a bit of a hillside corner, I used to think that odor was a problem just for my flatland neighbors and the poor people who must drive Highway 18 to work or play. In the seven and a half years we've lived here, I think I could safely say I've smelled the dump no more than 3-4 times a year.
All that has changed in the past six months. The odor is definitely getting worse. In the past three weeks, we've smelled dump odor up here 3-4 times each week!
I can't help but believe that the odor is both increasing and spreading wider as the dump gets higher.
Your email states, "please remember that any landfill will always have some odor no matter how hard they try to avoid it and no matter how good their gas collection and destruction system is." I hope that you and DEQ remember that a landfill's odor "footprint" changes as the landfill itself changes.
Riverbend CAN avoid increasing the odor it puts out -- by limiting the landfill's size. A larger landfill means more smell, more noise, more visibility, more litter -- more impact on our County and on Highway 18.
Please lodge my complaints about the current odor problem and PLEASE consider DEQ's proper role in protecting the Oregon environment.
Susan Watkins
[address and other data]
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