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Go~rie.com: Print Article <br />This is a printer friendly version of an article from www.goerie.com <br />To print this article open the file menu and choose Print. <br />Back to the article <br />Article published May 25, 2008 <br />Landfill expansion (AUDIO) <br />By John Guerriero <br />john.guerriero@timesnews.com <br />The casino's future ski. resort. <br />Page ~ of <br />That's what some Presque Isle Downs & Casino employees call the mountain that is Erie County's only landfill. <br />They joke, of course, but another mountain will be in the making if a state agency approves a permit change fo <br />Lake View landfill in Summit Township. <br />Waste Management, the landfill's owner and operator, is asking the state Department of Environmental <br />.Protection for a change that would allow the company to expand its landfill 90 acres south on land that the <br />company already. owns. <br />The company now digs into that land for dirt to cover the newly opened areas of the 130 acres that it uses for <br />the landfill, which at its peak Is 1,480 feet above sea level. <br />It's one of the highest peaks in Erie County; the highest point is 1,900 feet just south of Corry. The landfill <br />height is within or near the top 10 highest peaks in the county, said Joel Fair, .permitting section chief of the <br />waste management program for the DEP. <br />The tap of the landfill at 851 Robison Road E. affords a view not only of the nearby casino and track, but also of <br />Lake Erle and even Canada on a clear day. <br />But Lake View Landfill can only go so high -- 1,543 feet above sea level under its permit with the DEP, said <br />Corm Camillo, the local spokesman for. Waste Management. <br />So the clock is tkking, and the calendar is flipping. <br />The landfill that got 99.2 percent of its trash from Erie, Crawford and Mercer counties in 2007 has three to four <br />years of space left before it reaches capacity, he said. <br />It needs DEP approval to use more of its property for a landfill -- a process that could take one to two years of <br />review and comment, said Freda Tarbell, the agency's regional spokeswoman. <br />And no wonder. The application. is contained in eight binders that are each 5 inches thick, along with 45 <br />engineering drawings -- compared with the original five-page landfill application. <br />"I know it's a long time to read all of it, because I have," said Keith Doverspike, a Waste Management engineer. <br />A longer life <br />Modern landfills are a complex mix of the disciplines of engineering, geology, physics and meteorology, Camillo <br />said. <br />The anatomy of a typical landfill includes 15 layers for environmental protection. Think of it like a Dogwood <br />sandwich with garbage in between. <br />Then there's the 90 wells scattered. throughout the landfill that collect methane gas from decomposing garbage <br />-- an early part of the process to generate electricity from trash. The landfill powers its two office buildings from <br />the electricity and sells enough on the open market to light 6;000 homes a year, Camillo said. <br />That's a' far cry from early days of the property, part of which was a goat farm in the 1930s and a place where <br />people dumped their trash before the environmental movement and Waste Management's involvement, he said. <br />,_.a~ _ ~,. , . ,,. ~ .... <_.. - . _ . -..._ _ . ... _ . _ <br />