In April 2014, officials discovered the landfill cap near the Walkerton, Ind., golf course had eroded due to natural wear and tear, compromising a critical barrier designed to prevent the toxins from escaping. Officials say testing has found no imminent threat to public health, but the parks department is “aggressively pursuing solutions.”
In April 2014, an Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) site inspection discovered the landfill cap near Whispering Pines Golf Course in Walkerton, Ind., had eroded due to natural wear and tear, compromising a critical barrier designed to prevent the toxins from escaping, the Indianapolis (Ind.) Star reported.
Now, Indy Parks may have to pony up as much as $6 million to install new protections for the contamination at the old Julietta Landfill, a longtime industrial dumpsite that the city converted into the public golf course in the early 1990s, the Star reported.
Officials say testing since 2014 has found no imminent threat to public health. But a nearby neighborhood group says residents are concerned, nonetheless, about what a leaking landfill could mean for them, the Star reported.
Spanning 70 acres, the Julietta Landfill became a dumpsite almost by accident. A former pig farm, the property was leased in the 1950s to a sand and gravel company. The mining operation left huge pits in the ground when it abandoned the site in the early 1960s, according to IDEM records, and residents began dumping their household waste there illegally, the Star reported.
Later that decade, it was leased to a private landfill operator, and served as a dump for commercial and industrial waste until 1976, when the Indiana State Board of Health determined the site’s geology was unsuitable for use as a landfill, and the private operator voluntarily closed it. Later, the city used it to store more than 16,000 tons of sludge from a municipal wastewater treatment plant, the Star reported.
As early as 1988, the city began trying to repurpose it as a golf course. It’s not clear now, from a review of IDEM documents, why the plans went forward. But IDEM regulators warned a city consultant in 1988 that the pollution at the site was so extensive that it was under consideration to be added to the National Priorities List, an Environmental Protection Agency designation that makes it eligible for federal Superfund cleanup dollars, the Star reported.
In 1995—with a landfill cap and various monitoring protocols in place—Whispering Hills Golf Course opened to the public. But under state law, the parks department, as the landowner, also took on the long-term responsibility to keep what was buried there from getting out, the Star reported.
The golf course itself is across the road from the landfill, but the driving range sits at the northern end of where the refuse was buried. It is surrounded by things that ideally wouldn’t border a polluted site: to the east there’s a recreational fishing lake, to the west lies the Whispering Pines subdivision, and creeks crisscross the site, the Star reported.
“Just the idea of what is leeching into Buck Creek, it’s kind of disturbing,” said Jennifer Selm, the president of the Greater Troy Neighborhood Association.
While recent tests of water wells have come back clear, a review of IDEM records shows that hasn’t always been the case. In 2009, IDEM issued a boil-water notice for a water well on the golf course, which was city-owned but privately run. In 2010 and 2011, IDEM issued additional violations for failing to conduct required testing. IDEM officials were not immediately available for comment, the Star reported.
When a 2014 site investigation found standing water atop the landfill, and evidence that the cap had been damaged, IDEM issued a violation notice to the city, setting off a series of assessments as the city and IDEM put together a plan to fix it. Under state law, whoever owns former landfill property has to maintain it, and monitor contaminants, the Star reported.
“We have been aggressively pursuing solutions,” said Don Colvin, a planner at Indy Parks.
The city has spent nearly $300,000 already. And all told, Parks Director Linda Broadfoot said the project could cost as much as $6 million, spread out over a number of phases, which is close to a fifth of the department’s entire proposed budget for 2017, the Star reported.
Still, Broadfoot insists the department can cobble together the money. “Unfortunately, it’s a side effect of owning a lot of land,” she said. “Sometimes the land has a history that predates you that has to be dealt with.”
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