Just south of Candler off the Pisgah Highway is a lovely piece of property on Little Piney Mountain Road. Wooded, with creeks nearby, it would be an idyllic retreat for those who love the bucolic hills and valleys of western North Carolina.
Yet part of this same land was the site of the old Buncombe County Landfill, where before 1983, trash from the area was dumped into an open pit. In those days, there were no laws requiring landfills to be lined, so whatever material was tossed in there鈥攔anging from green bean cans to asbestos to lead batteries鈥攑ercolated, their chemicals leaching into the groundwater.
The old Buncombe County Landfill is one of 677 such dumps in North Carolina. Known more elegantly as聽鈥減re-regulatory landfills,鈥� most of them contain mystery substances. There are few, if any records of what was dumped. Local land records don鈥檛 list their location or their boundaries, which sometimes intrude into residential neighborhoods.
That鈥檚 what happened on Little Piney Road. Rep. Brian Turner, a Democrat representing Buncombe County, heard from a constituent who had unknowingly purchased a house and land, a section of which sat over the old dump.
鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 show up on a title search,鈥� said Turner, whose day job is in commercial real estate. 鈥淎nd the dump may not have to be on a person鈥檚 property to hurt them.鈥�
The seller was not required to disclose the location of the dump鈥攊f he or she knew it. Nor was there an easy way for a real estate broker to unearth the environmental history of a residential property. As it turns out, the new property owner learned of the dump from a neighbor, then had to drill a new well because the existing one was contaminated. Other homes on that road drilled new wells, too, because the pollution ran downhill.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Review Commission (ERC) heard from Michael Scott, director of the Division of Waste Management, about聽the status of the pre-regulatory landfill program. As part of the financial discussion鈥攁 solid waste tax helps pay for the assessment and remediation of these landfills鈥攖he topic of transparency came up.
It鈥檚 not uncommon, Scott said, for old dump records to be inadequate. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not like running into a white trash bag that you find in your kitchen,鈥� he told the ERC. 鈥淚t鈥檚 often metal trash cans or 55-gallon drums.鈥�
And the situation on Little Piney Mountain Road has been repeated in other places in the state, such as Onslow County, where part of a residential neighborhood had been overlaid on an old dump.
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