‘The smell is torture,’ San Fernando Valley residents say of Sunshine Canyon Landfill
By Dana Bartholomew | Los Angeles Daily News | August 28, 2016
GRANADA HILLS -- Six months after Stephen Beck moved into his newly built Legends at Cascades condo in Sylmar, he awoke to a noxious bedroom window invader.
An overwhelming smell of garbage.
“What we are talking about is stench,” said Beck, 75, who had moved into his home less than a mile from Sunshine Canyon Landfill in October 2009. “Like a pile of fruits or veggies that are rotting.”
“They can throw red herrings. But the fact is, we can smell it. It’s not BS. It’s in our face,” he said. “So, what we’ve learned to do is close our windows. That’s how we’re forced to live.”
Beck was among more than two dozen San Fernando Valley residents to testify in Granada Hills on Saturday before an independent air district law panel now considering a proposed nuisance abatement order in response to thousands of dump odor complaints.
During the first of an expected five public hearings, the five-member South Coast Air Quality Management District Hearing Board considered an air district proposal that aims to control the stench wafting from the 362-acre Sylmar dump, the county’s largest.
If approved, it would be the second order of abatement against landfill owner Republic Services in five years.
From 2009 to last month, South Coast air regulators received 9,224 complaints, from mostly Granada Hills and Sylmar. In the past three years, the district has issued more than 90 notices of violation.
“In the proceeding before the board today, the district alleges the odors are the result of insufficient gas collection, inadequate treatment of incoming daily waste, and inadequate daily and intermediate cover procedures,” Nick Sanchez, an attorney for the SCAQMD, told the board.
“As a result of the odors emanating from the landfill, a considerable number of persons living in the community and attending (its) elementary school have been forced to remain indoors,” Sanchez said.
The courtlike hearing drew an estimated 50 people to an auditorium at the Valley Academy of Arts and Sciences in Granada Hills.
It was in 2011, after decades of complaints from Valley residents, that the landfill and the air district reached a mutual agreement in a first abatement order to control odors.
Since then, Republic Services has spent $27 million to corral methane and other gases and control smells from emanating from the landfill within Los Angeles and L.A. County at the base of Newhall Pass.
The improvements include installing nearly 600 gas collection wells drilled into 58 years of waste, in addition to 15 miles of pipe leading to flares or a small power plant that burns off the gas. Plus 20,000 oak trees, fence-line misters and other odor stopping measures.
Since 2011, the large earthen bowl at Sunshine Canyon that collects up to 2.3 million tons of trash a year has tripled its ability to collect landfill gases, generally the source of nighttime complaints from nearby residents.
Now the Phoenix-based company is battling a nuisance order petition that would limit the dump’s daily intake of trash by a third, lop off three morning hours of operation, and demand improved covers to control garbage gases.
Landfill representatives say diverting as much as 3,000 daily tons to landfills in Simi Valley and Chiquita Canyon near Santa Clarita by 175 garbage trucks will further pollute the air by driving extra distances to distant dumps.
“It’ll have absolutely no impact on landfill odors, because the waste in the landfill generates gas for decades,” said Thomas M. Bruen, an attorney representing Republic Services, of the proposed restrictions. “The only way to control odor is to have a good gas collection system, which we believe we have.”
In a way, the entire air district nuisance rules and odor complaint and verification process was on trial, as attorneys for Republic Services zeroed in on roughly 30 local residents organized through social media they say have generated the most complaints.
“That rule, and the district policy, is under attack during these proceedings,” said the SCAQMD’s Sanchez.
A recent lawsuit by the company to get the names of complainants protected by the air district was defeated in court. Condo tenant Beck was among the plaintiffs on a class-action lawsuit filed in 2012 against Republic Services, now verging on a settlement.
Councilman Mitch Englander, who represents the North Valley, issued a letter in support of a nuisance order. “This community has suffered enough,” he said.
Steve Lee, who represents a group fighting an expansion of Chiquita Canyon near Val Verde, said he doesn’t want to see diverted garbage sent over from Sunshine Canyon.
“We don’t want the trash to be sent to us,” he said.
Wayde Hunter, who has fought the ills of Sunshine Canyon for 30 years, said Sunshine Canyon collects millions of tons of fresh trash each year “despite an odor problem they’ve not been able to correct.”
Four years ago, Nurha Hindi-Chahayed and her family bought a house in Granada Hills less than a half mile from the landfill. Six month later, she and her three kids experience the same sour whiff as Beck.
“The odors that we smell in the morning terrorize our morning routine,” said Hindi-Chahayed, president of the parent-teacher organization at Van Gogh Charter School, considered the epicenter for landfill smell. “Kids hold their noses when coming to class. We cannot hold morning assembly.”
“The smell is torture,” she said.
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