The landfill is currently closed to the public while some work is being completed on a new cell site.
County Mayor Mike Foster, during a workshop with members of the county commission Thursday night, made the announcement but added that the garbage collection convenience sites across the county remain open.” The landfill is closed right now. We’re still collecting garbage like we normally do at all the sites but nobody can come to the landfill and dump right now because we are in the final stages of getting the new cell completed. The liner is in but we’ve got two huge ditches cut in through there that tie the liner in. Until those are closed and we gravel into the cell, which will probably be another four or five weeks, the landfill itself will be closed but we’ll still take the garbage at the dump sites.”
“We would like for people, if they have, like a barn or house or something that they’re going to tear down and bring to the landfill to put that off until we get the landfill open again. Household garbage from all of the convenience sites is being transported to either Carthage or to Sparta right now and we’re paying them to dump it there, but we’re not transporting any rough garbage, like a house destruction or demolition, because it’s time consuming and very expensive for us to haul it, plus we have to pay them to dump it.”
“We still have room at the landfill to dump, we just can’t get up there right now because of the ditches. As soon as they get that finished, we’ll continue to dump at the old site. We probably still have three more months of dump site remaining on the old site. On the new site, we can only put household garbage for the first two or three months until we get the liner covered.”
“If the weather holds, they will probably complete all the work, maybe within a week. Then we’ll take about two weeks to put the gravel on and as soon as the state inspects it, the site will be released to where we can go ahead and start dumping garbage.”
“A company out of Alabama got the contract to do the final work but we did a lot of the early excavations ourselves at the landfill which will hopefully save about $300,000 off the bid price. We put in some silt fence, drainage ditches, and some of the rip rap. It saved $300,000 off of the bid price, but it probably cost us $60,000 to do the work. We’ll still save $240,000 off of the initial bid price which was an estimated $1.3 million.”
Meanwhile, Foster says some repair work is being done on a leachate tank at the landfill. “The leachate tank had some little leaks in it. We’ve been working on it, putting sealer on it. It was a very small amount of water that was leaking out, but we’ve already got that stopped. We’re painting the whole tank with two new coats of this crystalline thing that you paint on and it actually grows into the concrete and seals that up. It’s very expensive, about $4,000, but it’s on a leachate tank that’s been there probably 25 years. By doing this we ought to get at least another ten years of service out of it. The water that seeps into the cell, instead of it going into the ground, we pump it up into this leachate tank, and then we can either dump it back into the cell or we can carry and have it treated and dumped.”