Dump

ClarificationAn article in yesterday's editions of The Sun quoted a spokesman of the Maryland Department of the Environment as saying that smoke from a Clarksville dump fire has created an unhealthy situation. The department stated yesterday that the health effects of the fire cannot be determined unless information on the concentration of the pollutants and duration of people's exposure to them is professionally evaluated.Pub Date: 6/12/98Rain -- along with tons of dirt -- seems to have helped contain a fire at a controversial Clarksville dump that alarmed its neighbors as well as environmental and health officials this week.

A new blaze at the controversial tree-stump dump that has been burning and smoldering since February was extinguished early yesterday after a six-hour battle by Baltimore County firefighters.Although there has been fire smoldering for the past six months vTC among the thousands of tree stumps dumped at James F. Jett's property in the 8700 block of Dogwood Road in western Baltimore County, officials said the latest fire erupted Saturday night in a wood chip pile."There were three fires in the mulch pile," said Baltimore County Deputy Fire Chief J. Edward Crooks.

Most days, David Brown doesn't dare use the dishwasher in his home near Havre de Grace.Herman Hague, another Webster-area resident, says there are days that he can't wash clothes in his washing machine."

They once knew it as a rural playground, a meadow with cornflowers and willow trees perched above a clear-running stream. Then it became an Eisenhower-era landfill, a stop along Baltimore's trash belt that produced snowfalls of fly ash, where exploding oil drums shot sparks into the night like rockets on the Fourth of July.Now, four decades later, comes word that the long-closed 68th Street Dump/Industrial Enterprises site in Rosedale might be added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's list of Superfund cleanup sites.

It's not a mountain, not a slope for sledders and not a winter wonderland, this pile of snow at the former site of Lafayette Courts in East Baltimore.City crews have turned the 21.5-acre lot into a dump for the tons of snow left by the blizzard and storms that followed last week.They still were dumping there late yesterday afternoon at what is first and foremost a construction site. Orange flags pock the blinding-white landscape, marking hazards -- exposed brick storm drains, deep manholes, thick metal cable and debris left when the buildings were demolished in August.

Stephen McAllister steers his Jeep past a "Danger - Keep Out - Hazardous Materials" sign and a burned-out pickup truck rusting in the grass. He dodges discarded water heaters, one-wheeled bicycles, old refrigerators and fallen trees before reaching the top of a boulder that offers a splendid ribbon of Curtis Bay view. There, at a confluence of dump sites on the Anne Arundel County border, the one-time Greenpeace director-turned-suburban developer plans to build a 1,000-home development called Glen Abbey.

The private company overhauling military housing at Fort Meade halted construction in a small area of the project Friday when workers discovered what appears to be a trash dump from the 1940s. Workers with the Picerne Real Estate Group - the Rhode Island company that broke ground on the $3 billion project last month - discovered debris in a half-acre, wooded area east of Fort Meade's golf course last week. Base officials, who toured the site Friday for the first time, said the area is filled with old soda, milk and after-shave bottles, glass and pottery shards, and other household trash.

When Bernie Walker was a boy, he and his father would hunt muskrats in the wetlands behind their Rosedale home and fish for bass and crappie and catfish in Herring Run, which ran through their back yard. Then Robb Tyler, the trash king of Baltimore, arrived in town. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Walker watched Tyler's men dump garbage, medical waste, oil, industrial sludge, hot ashes from the incinerator and more into open pits in what is now known as the 68th Street dump. Pretty soon, dead fish started floating up covered with sores.

Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin heaved a rattan chair into the concrete trash pit. Robin Yasinow tossed a stack of papers from a project that didn't go well, and said good riddance to a stuffed bear given to her by an old flame. Claire Landers unloaded scrap wood from building a deck this summer and weeds and dead leaves from her garden. Then, she shouted, "Happy New Year, everyone!" For the small group of women, the Baltimore County landfill in Cockeysville became nothing less than a holy site yesterday.

Opponents of a plan to dump 18 million cubic yards of silt and mud in open waters near the Bay Bridge were buoyed yesterday to learn that a key federal agency -- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service -- has gone on record against the dredging proposal.In a strongly worded letter Monday to the Army Corps of Engineers, fish and wildlife officials criticized a draft environmental impact statement for "errors, omissions, inconsistencies and apparent bias."The letter, addressed to the Corps of Engineers' regional office in Baltimore, also threatened to take the issue before the Council on Environmental Quality, which arbitrates policy disputes among federal regulatory agencies.