Neighbors Feel Dumped On -- County Seeks To Expand Cedar Hills Landfill, But Nearby Residents Say Enough Garbage Is Enough

EASTSIDE

Leslie Morgan's Thanksgiving two years ago was shaping up just right.

Her family and relatives were gathered for the holiday. She'd spent all day in the huge kitchen of her new 4,300-square-foot dream home east of Renton, and the roasting turkey was ready to be the steaming centerpiece of the November feast.

It would have been perfect, she said. If the Cedar Hills Landfill hadn't crashed her party again.

"The odor just kind of moved in," Morgan said. "We ate Thanksgiving dinner in this horrible, horrible odor. It's so humiliating when the odor comes in and you've got a group of people who want to leave because they can't stand it."

And that's not the half of it, she says. Two years ago, she and more than 20 neighbors sued King County, contending the overpowering stench combines with a brain-addling, foundation-cracking drone of machinery and Hitchcockian swarms of scavenging sea gulls to make life unbearable and slash the value of their homes.

Still, last month the county applied to open a new 33-acre hole at Cedar Hills to continue burying garbage at the site. The neighbors - some two miles away - are hoping to stop it.

The county categorically denies the 35-year-old dump has caused any problems. And some suggest that something stinks about people moving next door to a landfill and then complaining about it. The dispute's outcome has the potential to alter the county's waste management, perhaps forcing it to close the dump earlier than planned and ship garbage over the Cascades.

"We have spent millions of dollars on that landfill to be the best neighbors possible," said Verna Bromley, a King County deputy prosecutor who represents the county in the lawsuit, set to go to trial in January.

"We're confident when the full record is brought before the court, we'll be able to demonstrate the neighbors' characterizations are misplaced and inaccurate."

King County began pouring its trash into the 920 hilltop acres known as Cedar Hills in 1964. Since then, 360 acres have been filled with waste and covered over, one section at a time, becoming rolling meadows that are home to deer, coyotes, a bear and families of majestic bald eagles.

For the past two decades, the county has occasionally considered closing the entire landfill and carting its garbage to Eastern Washington or Oregon. But now the plan is to keep Cedar Hills open another dozen years or so and fill perhaps three more sections.

The landfill takes in about 2,500 tons of garbage a day from every county home and business outside Seattle. As sea gulls and ravens swirl overhead, semi after semi dumps its reeking load to be pushed by gargantuan tractors into shape.

Then the refuse is layered with dirt and run through with gas and water pipes so that gradually the current section has become a mammoth mound that watches over pastoral pastures and suburban subdivisions.

It's called "Area 4." And if that sounds sort of creepy, in a government-conspiracy, "X-Files" kind of way, the neighbors agree.

"Most of the people in this community feel what's been done is criminal and negligent," said Morgan, a physical therapist who built her house in 1990 on five acres a half-mile from Area 4.

"I knew there was a landfill when we moved in," she said, "but I had no idea (it would be this bad). I would never have built here if I ever, ever thought this was a possibility. We have the right to enjoy life and property, and they have taken that away."

Marge Langdahl, who lives down the street, agrees. One hot summer she took a week off work planning to do outdoor home repairs. The stench was so bad she couldn't go outside without getting nauseated.

It doesn't smell bad all the time. One cloudy recent spring day, for instance, there was no way to tell Morgan's home was near a garbage heap. But when it gets bad, the neighbors say, it reeks.

"It's a chemical, (methane) gas smell," said Langdahl, who built her home on the edge of the landfill property in 1992. "It's not something that's natural. It's noxious. It assaults you when you smell it. It's amazing how many times you tried to ignore it, but it would stop you dead in your tracks."

And it's not just the smell, the neighbors say. Some also describe a mysterious sonic vibration, called "flare stack rumble," that they say rattles their homes like an earthquake, cracks walls and driveways and is maddening to the senses.

"It's like a surging, humming noise," Morgan said. "You lay your head down on a pillow and it's magnified."

Most frustrating, the neighbors say, is that the rumble is the byproduct of fighting the stink - four huge flares burn off the gases that emanate from the decomposing garbage. If the gas mixes with air incorrectly, experts say, the unit sounds a terrible low roar.

And then there are the birds.

Once Morgan's two daughters called her at work in a panic. "They were just hysterical," she said. "Our whole roof was covered by this flock of sea gulls."

The result, the neighbors say, is that they are stuck. If they put their homes up for sale, they have to disclose the landfill problems to buyers.

"Who would spend the kind of money it would cost to buy this house?" Morgan said. "We have totally paid the price for Area 4."

In the latest round of this dispute, the Solid Waste Division has applied to the county Health Department to stop dumping at soon-to-be-filled Area 4 and open Area 5, which would have enough room to take trash for five years.

A permit is expected to be issued as early as this week. Meanwhile, huge earthmovers are already putting the last touches on the huge pit in preparation for the waste.

After Area 5 is full, the county foresees an Area 6 and maybe even an Area 7 at Cedar Hills.

But the neighbors object to the landfill staying open at all. They claim the county purposely ignored its own research when it submitted an environmental-impact statement for the new pit, essentially denying all knowledge of environmental harm caused by the garbage dump.

"At a minimum, there was a very concerted attempt to place a spin on the information they were recording to cast the landfill in the most positive light possible," said Brad Jones, a Tacoma lawyer who represents the neighbors and the 3,500 surrounding residents covered by the class-action lawsuit.

Meanwhile, complaining about the landfill is a decades-old tradition.

In 1985, the county paid a group of neighbors $195,000 to settle a suit against Cedar Hills. The next year, it paid another group $112,000 after a county judge found the landfill's odor infringed on their property rights. Later that same year, a federal judge sided with a group called NO-DUMP and ordered significant changes in the way the landfill is managed.

Still, the county dismisses the current neighbors' complaints outright. Since the trouble in the 1980s, officials say, management and engineering improvements - from piping away gases and bad water to covering the garbage with a grid of anti-bird wires - prevent any of the alleged problems.

"We certainly are interested in being as good a neighbor as we can and we've taken steps in that direction," said Kevin Kiernan, engineering manager for the county's Solid Waste Division.

On paper, the county essentially says the neighbors simply are wrong. In one legal document, the Cedar Hills operations manager, Dennis Trammell, says the landfill doesn't smell and suggests the stink is actually from a nearby natural-gas pipeline or, more likely, the Cedar Grove Composting business down the road.

True, Cedar Grove has been a problem. At the same time they sued the county two years ago, Morgan, Langdahl and her neighbors also sued Cedar Grove because of its odor. They settled out of court two months ago for $14.5 million, although they'll be lucky to see more than a few hundred dollars each, at least any time soon, because Cedar Grove doesn't have the money to pay.

Anyway, they say, the compost smell hasn't been so bad since 1997, when state air-pollution regulators fined the company $500,000 and ordered new equipment installed.

Trammell also says he has never detected any phantom rumbles and suggests the vibrations the neighbors feel come from a nearby gravel pit or buzzing from high-capacity power lines near the landfill.

The birds, the county says, would be there anyway.

"Sea gulls are attracted to a wide variety of habitats including, but not limited to, playing fields, mowed pastures, bodies of water and landfills," a court document says.

But county officials acknowledge that Area 4 has had its share of challenges.

It was built larger than previous sections in anticipation of receiving Seattle's garbage when the city closed the Midway landfill north of Federal Way in the mid-1980s. But Seattle stopped sending garbage to Cedar Hills in 1994.

That meant the trash rotted and began to stink before Area 4 was full enough to close. But Kiernan, with the Solid Waste Division, says modern engineering has kept problems in check.

And he flatly denies any deceit in the environmental statements for the new Area 5, adding that the report "meets or exceeds all the requirements under the law."

But the more the county insists the Cedar Hills landfill is a good neighbor, the more angry are the neighbors.

"Until they acknowledge they have problems, there's no hope for this community," Morgan said. "I don't care if I live next to a landfill or not. We as citizens expect them to protect our environment. Being next to a landfill doesn't mean you should have Area 4."