Landfill

Howard County residents can track the progress of snowplows by visiting the county's home page: www.howardcountymd.gov, and clicking on the snowflake icon. A snow-tracker map will show location of plows, untreated roads, salted roads and plowed roads. The maps are to be updated every 15 minutes. Each county snow vehicle is equipped with a global positioning device to allow residents to track its real-time progress during a storm. Residents can also call 410-313-2900 for information on maintenance efforts.

A last-minute appeal from residents opposed the expansion of Harford's only county-run solid waste landfill will halt the process to issue permits for the project. "The permit cannot move forward," said Horatio Tablada, waste management administrator at the Maryland Department of the Environment, the permitting agency. The county must have the permit to commence with expansion of the Harford Waste Disposal Center, a 60-acre facility in Street that is expected to reach capacity by the end of next year.

In a deal that could benefit Baltimore's air quality and its bottom line, city officials said yesterday that they will soon capture methane gas from a landfill and sell it to the Coast Guard as a source of energy. The 16,000 tons of methane generated by the Quarantine Road Landfill annually will be pumped to the Coast Guard Yard, which will use the gas to light and heat its 112-acre facility on Hawkins Point Road in Curtis Bay - reducing its reliance on traditional energy sources. Several local governments across the country and in Maryland - including Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties - are looking at ways not only to reuse methane, which is a greenhouse gas, but also to turn what gas they collect into a revenue source.

After criticizing repairs to Baltimore's Quarantine Landfill in 1995, public works managers David Marc and Jeanne Robinson say their bosses punished them.Marc says he lost use of his city-owned car, laptop computer and parking pass. Robinson says her supervisors cut her staff from 60 employees to three and slashed her bureau's budget from $17 million to $150,000, according to court records.They also say they were denied opportunities for promotions and given menial tasks usuallyperformed by students or low-level engineers, the court records state.

The Howard County Planning Board narrowly endorsed last night a proposal to construct a lighted, in-line skating rink in the park that was built on the former Alpha Ridge landfill in Marriottsville.The five-member board voted 3-2 to recommend that County Executive James N. Robey include the $300,000 cost of building the facility in his fiscal year 2000 capital budget.Voting in support of the plan were Chairman Robert F. Geiger and members Haskell Arnold and Joan Lancos. Members Gary Kaufman and J. Landon Reeve sided with a handful of homeowners, who complained that traffic and lights to allow skating at night would ruin the area's pastoral nature.

Maybe things were destined to go foul here, in this grassy Marriottsville park adjacent to a former landfill."It seems this area is selected by each administration for dumping on," says Western Howard County resident Donald Gill, who almost two decades ago was forced to become next-door neighbor to a giant trash can.The latest controversy surrounding the former Alpha Ridge landfill -- a proposed in-line skating pavilion up for a public hearing tonight --...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to add a closed landfill in Baltimore County with a long history of environmental problems to its list of Superfund cleanup sites, federal officials said yesterday.EPA officials said the 165-acre 68th Street Dump/Industrial Enterprises site in Rosedale has been the source of environmental concerns since at least 1955, when Maryland health officials recommended the landfill be closed. Hazardous substances detected at the site include volatile organic compounds, metals and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, according to the EPA.An EPA spokeswoman said officials proposed the site for the Superfund list because runoff could harm nearby Chesapeake Bay tributaries such as Herring Run and Moores Run."

The Westminster Rescue Mission Store will have to sell a lot of donated goods to pay for the rubble it just sent to the county landfill.The demolition of the old two-level store on Main Street added 415 tons of construction debris to the Northern Landfill. The nonprofit mission must pay a private contractor $34,000 for the demolition and can ill afford a $19,500 bill for landfill use, one of the largest in memory. It has asked the county for a waiver of the landfill-use bill."We really could not afford this whole thing," said the Rev. Clifford Elkins, mission executive director.

TULLYTOWN, Pa. -- On the Delaware River a few miles south of Trenton, Martha Paden, 72, was sunbathing on the poop deck of the black and white houseboat she and her husband have lived on for 15 years.Across the water and beyond some trees, a bald mountain challenged the sky. But even when the roar of giant trucks reached the boat, Paden was content.For a decade, Paden, a retired roller-skating teacher, has seen the mountain slowly rise, built of countless truckloads of trash.It is one of hundreds of modern, leak-proof private landfills that have opened around the country in recent years, replacing thousands of town dumps.

The county commissioners adopted yesterday a 10-year plan to extend the life of Carroll's Northern Landfill by recycling liquid waste and converting building debris into road construction material.After minor revisions, the 1999 Solid Waste Management Plan will be forwarded next month to the Maryland Department of the Environment, county officials said.The agency must approve the 271-page document before it can be implemented. The approval process is expected to take about 60 days."The bottom line is, we want to do things that will slow the use of the landfill's existing space or recapture some of the space," Gary Horst, the county's director of enterprise and recreation services, told the commissioners during a brief public hearing yesterday on the waste management plan.

Hoping to make some green out of going green, Annapolis officials are weighing an ambitious plan to convert an old municipal dump into a "renewable energy park" that would generate enough electricity to supply all of the power the state capital consumes, using landfill gas, yard waste and the sun's rays for fuel. The City Council is expected to vote soon on an agreement with a Linthicum-based business group to produce electricity on 500 acres of city-owned land near Parole. The project could net the city up to $750,000 a year in revenue and savings while demonstrating a variety of renewable-energy technologies, proponents say. As a bonus, a little-used public park next to the former landfill would be improved, creating an arboretum-like native plant garden in the meadows and woods surrounding the city's old reservoir.

Baltimore County residents can no longer put most household electronics out for trash collection starting Friday, when a new law takes effect. The county council enacted the legislation to keep potentially hazardous materials such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic out of landfills and waste-to-energy plants. Residents will be responsible for recycling computer equipment, such as monitors, keyboards, printers, laptops, and scanners, as well as televisions, VCRs, DVD players, telephones, including cell phones and answering machines, stereos, fax machines, and video display devices.

It should come as no surprise that some people living in the vicinity of Key Bridge aren't thrilled by the idea of power plant fly ash showing up at a local landfill. In recent years, the effects of improperly handled coal ash have gotten a lot of attention, from the contaminated wells near a Gambrills landfill to the billion gallons of the stuff that accidentally spilled into the Tennessee River last year. But the question before the Maryland Department of the Environment is whether to allow 7.4 million tons of so-called "coal combustion byproducts" to be dumped in an industrial landfill that was built to higher specifications than the failed Gambrills site and is proposed to be upgraded further.

Nearly two years after Constellation Energy was fined $1 million for contaminating the wells of some Gambrills residents by dumping coal ash, the company is seeking a new local repository for residue from its coal-burning power plants - an industrial landfill in Southeast Baltimore. But the plan to deposit up to 650,000 tons of ash a year in a chemical company landfill at Hawkins Point is generating opposition from northern Anne Arundel County residents, who live south and southwest of the industrial area.

Maryland celebrated Earth Day on Wednesday at schools, malls, transit facilities - and landfills. Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. began Earth Day posing for photos inside a recycling trailer that was partially filled with discarded electronics. "It's so clean that I don't mind," he said Wednesday at the Eastern Sanitary Landfill in White Marsh. With the collection of unwanted computers, TVs and VCRs at the Baltimore County Resource Recovery Facility in Cockeysville averaging about 100,000 pounds a month, officials are expanding the program to the county's other two drop-off waste facilities at White Marsh and Halethorpe.

Carroll County commissioners are scheduled to be updated this morning on a plan to join with Frederick County in building a waste-to-steam facility that eventually could save both counties millions of dollars but which has drawn opposition because of environmental concerns and large upfront costs. Carroll Public Works Director J. Michael Evans will present the commissioners with a status report on a proposed facility to be constructed in Frederick County that could offset county's needs for dumping trash in landfills or transferring waste to neighboring states.

In Frank Marion's Millersville home, ornate mirrors hang on walls painted rich shades of gold. Pillows are arranged just so on the leather sofa. And in nearly every corner, a flickering candle emits a soft perfume. That's the only way to mask the smell from the dump, Marion said. Since early summer, Marion and his neighbors say that they have noticed the air filling with the pungent scent of rotten eggs nearly every evening around supper time. They blame the foul smell on the nearby Millersville landfill.

Raising a stink: Some neighbors of the Millersville landfill in Anne Arundel County say that on most evenings since early summer the air has been filled with a foul smell that reminds them of rotten eggs. They are asking the county to appoint a third party to monitor landfill emissions, and they want the air and their well water tested. He is a survivor: An Ellicott City man wearing gray stood out in the "Parade of Pink" at last Sunday's Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. Bob Smith, who underwent a mastectomy in May, wants to draw attention to the reality that breast cancer is not solely a women's disease.

Developers for old city landfill site are named The Baltimore Development Corp. said yesterday that it has chosen developers for the former Bowleys Lane Landfill and Eastern Sanitation Yard in Northeast Baltimore. Chesapeake Real Estate Group and McCrary Development, which plan to build a $31.7 million light industrial and warehouse business park called Moravia Business Center, will enter into negotiations with the BDC on the project. The development would include five buildings totaling 423,800 square feet and would create about 140 permanent jobs.

An assessment of the Harford Waste Disposal Center has uncovered 56 violations, including unsafe areas and equipment, escaping litter, inadequate trash cover and erosion of surrounding ground at the county landfill in Street. The county received the results nearly two months ago and has since developed a response plan with some improvements in place, officials said yesterday. "Some violations are minor, and several have gone on for more than 10 years, back two previous administrations," said county spokesman Robert B. Thomas Jr. "A variety of factors led to long-and short-term issues.