Source of landfill well contamination in Wadena a mystery

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Wadena County Solid Waste will investigate where vinyl chloride that has impacted two monitoring wells at the demolition landfill is coming from by digging test pits this summer, Solid Waste Director Mike Hanan informed the county board.

Solid waste has had several conversations with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency about the contaminated wells, he said. Vinyl chloride is a contaminant not typically associated with demo landfills. It’s an organic that can be a by-product of things breaking down in a municipal landfill, which was there at one time, he said. He’s raised the question with the MPCA about where the contamination might be coming from because of the direction the county thinks the groundwater flows.

The two impacted wells are on the west boundary and the north boundary of the demolition landfill, Hanan said. The facility neighbors a waste site once used by the city of Wadena and a closed landfill monitored by the MPCA.

The MPCA is going to try and determine the elevation of groundwater in the area, Hanan said. They will put that information together with the wells that are out there and hopefully come to an agreement on what direction groundwater is flowing.

“The MPCA has a couple impacted wells on their property, too, which doesn’t seem to make sense to them either,” Hanan said. “So it’s kind of a cooperative effort.”

The MPCA has been really good to work with as far as being reasonable and looking at everybody’s theories, Hanan said.

“Early on it sounded like the MPCA wanted this done yesterday,” Hanan said.

Now they’ve agreed to let the county complete a report as part of the 2010 annual report, he said. They hope to have the pits dug in June. They would like to do some test pits on the west side to see if some debris was left behind when the state moved waste to the closed landfill.

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