Did the storm water that accumulated at the Waimanalo Gulch Sanitary Landfill last December and January come into contact with solid waste, thus requiring it to be treated as leachate? This question is at the heart of a dispute between state health officials and managers of the landfill, O`ahu’s only repository for municipal solid waste.
Most of the recent controversy over events at the landfill stems from the inundation of Leeward beaches with vials of blood, hypodermic needles and other medical waste, as well as unknown amounts of municipal waste that had been deposited in a landfill cell that overflowed with storm water on January 13.
In the quest to determine whether the disaster could have been avoided, a Department of Health investigation into the discharge of potentially contaminated water late last year has also become a hot topic, since it suggests that Waste Management Hawai`i, Inc., which has operated the landfill for the City and County of Honolulu since it opened more than 20 years ago, was having major problems managing its storm water well before the breach in January.
When or whether the DOH will issue a violation warning or notice to Waste Management and the City and County of Honolulu, which owns the site, is unknown. But recent statements by Waste Management general manager Joseph Whelan and city Department of Environmental Services director Timothy Steinberger make it clear that that they see nothing wrong with their having pumped storm water last December from a landfill cell into a channel that empties into the sea.
What’s more, in the hours preceding the January disaster, Steinberger actually argued against Health Department efforts to get the city to post warning signs in the event of an especially heavy rain.
Should the DOH find that unauthorized discharges occurred, Waste Management could face fines of up to $25,000 per violation per day. Violating terms of the landfill’s solid waste permit could add another $10,000 per day.
Deluged
December 2010 was an unusually wet month for O`ahu. Rains began overwhelming the landfill’s water management systems as early as the 10th. That day, a Friday, the landfill received about two inches of rain in a short period of time, raising the leachate level in one of its sumps above the maximum permitted level set by the state, according to a DOH incident report.
It took three days of pumping, with the addition of a second pump on Monday, to bring the leachate level back down into compliance.
On December 18, the last day the landfill accepted waste until it began accepting limited amounts on January 28, landfill workers covered the day’s trash with a foot of soil. It rained hard the next day and on December 20, Waste Management contacted the DOH’s Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch, giving notice that it would be “draining storm flows … into the storm water drain systems.” This, Steinberger contended later, in a January 13 letter to the DOH, was in accord with established practice whenever flows were “as heavy as a 24-hour, 25-year storm.”
Clean Water Branch (CWB) inspectors visited the landfill on December 21. They were told of the measures Waste Management was taking to dispose of the accumulated storm water and left “without indicating to WMH that they had any concerns regarding WMH’s actions,” Steinberger wrote.
But when inspectors from the Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch (SHWB) visited the site two days later, they noticed something disturbing. The storm water being discharged into the drainage system appeared to have been in contact with municipal solid waste. Steinberger, in his January 13 letter, suggested that the inspectors’ concerns were minimized because “the entire island was under a brown water advisory.” Yet the SHWB team was concerned enough to alert the CWB and investigators from that branch responded immediately. They found that the rain had caused a three-foot-wide drainage pipe running under a new solid waste cell, E6, to become clogged with silt and debris. The drainage pipe was intended to receive storm waters from upslope of E6, but with the pipe blocked, runoff flowed over diversions and into the cell itself.
Waste Management environmental protection manager Justin Lottig informed CWB inspectors that between the afternoon of December 19 and December 23, the landfill had intermittently pumped storm water from cell E6 into the drainage system, which empties into the ocean at the Ko Olina resort. He estimated that at one point, storm water in the cell was 38 feet deep.
“J. Lottig stated that the storm water that normally collects in the E6 cell flows through the cell into the leachate collection system where it would be collected and transported to the Wai`anae Wastewater Treatment Plant for treatment as industrial wastewater,” a December 23 CWB investigation report states. The report also notes that Lottig said the pumped storm water “may have contacted solid waste.”
Inspectors Matthew Kurano and Jamie Tanimoto, however, were sure of what they saw. They wrote in their report that it appeared that standing water in the cell may have penetrated the leachate collection system while exposing solid waste. They also saw significant amounts of exposed waste in one part of the cell.
“The downstream area of the cell appeared significantly polluted with a mixture of solid waste and storm water. … The storm water observed within the E6 cell was clearly in contact with and passed through solid waste. As such, the liquid observed within the E6 cell was landfill leachate,” they wrote.
Next Steps
In their report, the CWB inspectors wrote that the company had violated state law by failing to get DOH permission to pump water from cell E6 – water they characterized as leachate, and not storm water — into the storm water drainage system. They added that enforcement actions might be necessary and that the branch would be pursuing a notice of apparent violation and request for information.
After their inspection, the investigators asked Waste Management to sample the storm water and stop pumping it into the storm drain system. That same afternoon, the CWB’s acting chief, Joanna Seto, instructed the city to issue a press release stating that there had been a release of storm water that was potentially contaminated with leachate into the Ko Olina coastal area.
Because Seto did not explain why she thought the storm water might have been contaminated, Steinberger wrote in his letter, his department refused, arguing that storm water is not leachate under the law and that draining flows was an established practice with which the DOH was familiar.
The DOH instead issued its own press release on the evening of December 23, announcing that it was investigating the discharge of potentially contaminated storm water from Waimanalo Gulch into the ocean. In a Honolulu Star-Advertiser report that followed, city representatives contradicted what Lottig had reportedly told the CWB and what inspectors saw, stating, “At no time was the storm water mixed with any solid waste.”
Also, Steinberger pointed out in his letter to the DOH, test results of the storm water showed that it met state and federal standards for storm water run off, “except for naturally-occurring background concentrations of iron and zinc, which are typically found in storm water discharges throughout O`ahu.”
Even so, according to letters from Ko Olina vice president of resort operations Ken Williams, and Bob Teramoto, president of The Coconut Plantation condos at Ko Olina, the storm water coming from the landfill was worse than normal.
“Our residents have reported increased water flow and odor smelling like a dump,” Teramoto wrote in a January 28 letter to Whelan. Teramoto expressed his association’s concern that Waste Management’s expansion activities at the landfill had altered the drainage.
“Is it possible for the leach from the landfill to contam
inate the rain runoff causing the smell? … This is an important situation that needs to be addressed. It will benefit the community at large by assisting in maintaining the landfill and addressing the drainage issues,” he wrote.
In testimony last month before the state Land Use Commission, which oversees the special use permit that allows the landfill to operate in the Agriculture District, Whelan disputed any assertion that the water that was pumped into the drainage system was leachate. No water from within the cell was pumped into the ocean, only water on top of the cell, he said.
When pressed by attorneys representing the Ko Olina Community Association and U.S. Representative Colleen Hanabusa about the observations detailed in the December 23 CWB report, Whelan would not deny or admit to anything since an investigation was ongoing. He did say he believed leachate in the cell had no contact with storm water.
According to Markus Owens, public information officer for the city’s Department of Environmental Services, the landfill’s storm water management plan prohibits water from ponding on top of waste cells and the city’s solid waste permit allows water to be pumped off.
He argues that CWB inspectors have no idea what the makeup of the storm water was and contends it was separated from waste in the cell by about a foot of soil.
“The problem was, they saw a couple of bags and stuff floating on the water, which could have been fugitive bags and not necessarily waste that had been uncovered,” he says.
When asked whether that mattered, Owens says, “Absolutely. If you drive a car on the road, you drop a paper bag in a puddle, that’s leachate? … If so, we’ve got leachate going out every storm drain on the island,” he says, adding that the CWB is trying to redefine leachate.
Splitting Hairs
About two weeks after the state launched an investigation into the allegedly unauthorized pumping, weather forecasts indicated that rain might threaten cell E6 again. This time, on January 11, the Health Department, the city and Waste Management agreed to send any accumulated storm water to the city’s Wai`anae and Kailua wastewater treatment plants “so as to facilitate the incremental re-opening of the impacted E6 cell,” Steinberger wrote.
On January 12, with O`ahu under a flood advisory, Mike Tsuji of the CWB asked the city and Waste Management to post contaminated water warning signs if an event similar to the December 19 storm occurred.
To Steinberger, the request seemed unreasonable. He argued that storm water from the December 19 event had not “percolated or passed through or emerged from solid waste,” and was therefore not leachate under Hawai`i Administrative Rules.
In his letter, Steinberger acknowledged a condition in the city’s solid waste permit that would seem to require the city to treat the storm water as leachate, but he did not give it any weight. (This despite the fact that even the landfill’s surface water management plan states that the drainage system should prevent “runoff of surface water that has contacted waste.”)
The condition states: “Storm water that comes in contact with solid waste shall be managed and disposed of as leachate.” The condition has been included in the DOH permits for Waimanalo Gulch since at least 2003. A strict reading of the condition would mean that if any storm water so much as touches solid waste, it can’t be discharged into the sea under the landfill’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit. Instead, it must be trucked to a wastewater treatment plant for disposal.
In the eyes of the CWB, it also means that any discharge of that water should be treated similar to a sewer spill. And on January 13, given the predicted rainfall, the branch demanded that the city and WMH post signs warning the public about contaminated water discharges. By this time, the storm had already washed waste from cell E6 offsite. Apparently unaware of the extent of the situation when he wrote the letter, Steinberger stated that the city disagreed with the CWB’s conclusion that the storm water should be treated as wastewater.
Under Health Department rules, when there is a spill from a wastewater system, signs must be posted in areas likely to be affected and where public access is possible.
“We are assuming that this is the purported legal basis for CWB’s directive … However, this is not applicable to the present circumstances because [Waimanalo Gulch] is not a ‘wastewater system’ as defined by HAR section 11-62-03,” he wrote.
In his January 13 letter to DOH deputy director Gary Gill, SHWB chief Steven Chang, and the CWB’s Seto, Steinberger did not dispute that storm water touched solid waste (although he did not admit it, either).
“SHWB asserted, first, that accumulated storm water is leachate that may not be pumped into the storm drain system but must be disposed of at the treatment plants. Then, today, CWB asserts even more broadly that WGSL’s storm water runoff requires the posting of warning signs as if it were wastewater. These conclusions are not supported by the facts of the law, and are contrary to the measures that ENV [the city’s Environmental Services Department] and WMH have taken over the years, at DOH’s direction and/or with DOH’s approval,” he wrote.
Waste Management representative Keith DeMello adds in an email to Environment Hawai`i that, on January 13, millions of gallons of storm water “scoured some waste, which appears to have been limited to plastics and other floatable material. It is misleading to characterize the discharge as “leachate,” which is the liquid that is secreted from municipal solid waste.” He also states that water sampling over the last two months has only produced results typical of storm water.
In the end, given the magnitude of the spill, signs were eventually posted. At the February LUC hearing, Whelan testified that after discussing the matter with the Health Department on the afternoon of January 13, a “collective decision” was made to post warning signs.
When asked by Ko Olina attorney Ben Matsubara whether the city would be investigating any possible violations at the site, Steinberger said that his department was deferring to the DOH and that since no notice of violation has been issued, he considered the facility to be in compliance with all government regulations.
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 21 Number 8, March 2011
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