This Advance photo shows a load of garbage on its way to its final resting place in the Fresh Kills landfill. Dumping Grounds. Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world and received as much as 29, tons of trash per day during its peak operation in Birds swarm Fresh Kills Landfill on July 29, Deodorant is spread on the landfill.
In this Advance photo, Ursala Zysnarski, a chemist for the Department of Hazardous Materials, tests the air to see if there are any toxins at the Fresh Kills landfill after about 70 workers were sickened by vapors. In this July 19, , Advance photo, Dennis Hernon, a worker at the Fresh Kills landfill, transports a load of refuse.
In this Nov. In this Advance photo, water birds add to the serene beauty of Fresh Kills Creek -- even with a mountain of trash rising at the landfill in the background. A bulldozer stirs up a cloud of seagulls at the Fresh Kills landfill in In this undated Advance photo, garbage is hauled along the top of the Fresh Kills landfill.
In the foreground is Arden Avenue. Barges being pushed by a tug at the Fresh Kills landfill. This Advance photo shows garbage being unloaded at the Fresh Kills landfill.
The towers eventually were the only city landmark that could be seen above the landfill. Like a bear with salmon, the bulldozer skewers, drags, and tears the truck, which is loaded with other trash onto a trailer, carried farther into the landfill, and interred.
The final shots are of pools of water rimmed by garbage and plants, and hot piles of waste tossing off black smoke. Fresh Kills opened in When Matta-Clark made the film, in , it received roughly half of the solid waste in the city, and had long been the largest landfill in the world, eventually growing to about twenty-two hundred acres of trash.
Fill operations had the virtue—at least to developers—of creating new real estate in a city bounded by water. But building out the shores also proved problematic, as the new coastline began to jut into shipping lanes. Ocean dumping, while easy and cheap, faced related problems. In the twentieth century, incineration became the great hope for the future of waste disposal. In , Mayor John Hylan proposed that a fleet of incinerators be placed throughout the boroughs.
When a judge ruled, in , that New York City would need to end its ocean dumping—New Jersey had successfully sued the city over the trash blanketing its beaches—incineration became even more attractive. Consumerism was on the rise, and a flood of mass-produced goods made disposal a priority; Melosi notes that, in the ten years after the First World War, the amount of solid waste the city produced rose by seventy per cent.
But incinerators were expensive to repair and maintain, and the pollution they produced was particularly unpopular. The tides shifted slightly back in favor of landfills. Enter Fresh Kills, which consists of a tidal inlet and salt marshes on the western coast of Staten Island. In , with Guy Molinari providing crucial support, Rudy Giuliani successfully ran for mayor vowing to close Fresh Kills. Finally, on March 22, , the last barge of garbage was unloaded here. The city's trash is now shipped to landfills outside of the state, and there is an entire generation of Staten Islanders who do not know what it was like to live alongside the largest landfill in the world.
It is just difficult to understand what 18, tons a day is. As these processes occur, there will be a continuing need for regular maintenance, monitoring and evaluation of the site and systems that have been put into place? It is essential that access to these systems be preserved during this time for inspection, maintenance and repair.
Two of the four mounds at Fresh Kills are already capped with a thick, impermeable cover that separates the waste from the environment and the public. The remaining two mounds are in the process of being capped. No area will be open to ongoing public access until it has been tested and found safe for park use. The Solid Waste Management regulations address the need to identify and manage current or future potential releases of pollutants or the mitigation of contaminants from a landfill, and to control and mitigate any impacts once landfill operations have ceased.
Among the requirements, all of which are met at Fresh Kills, are landfill gas control, leachate collection and treatment, and a post—closure operation and maintenance plan for a minimum 30—year period. The emissions of concern from landfills are non—methane organic compounds NMOC and methane.
The Fresh Kills gas containment and collection system is comprised by the landfill cap and a system of gas collection trenches and header pipes that convey the gas to one or more collection points onsite, either for beneficial use power generation or for flaring under controlled conditions. While most of the gas is recovered for reuse by National Grid, the flare stations are a back—up safety measure in the event that the recovery system is down.
In the future, when little or no gas is generated by the site and the active extraction system is no longer cost—effective, the remaining methane will be flared off. Unlike air and water, the framework for regulation of soil quality is not established by a single law or program.
Rather, there is a collection of regulations and guidelines at the federal and state levels that are intended to apply to soil in certain situations. Both the federal and state hazardous materials management programs provide procedures for evaluating whether soils have the potential to cause adverse impacts to human health or the environment.
This is generally performed on a case—by—case basis, since the potential for adverse impacts depends on the likely pathways and extent of exposure. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act, commonly referred to as the Clean Water Act CWA , requires the EPA to establish and periodically update national water quality standards that are based on quantifiable pollutant concentrations and that aim to protect the environment and human health.
Individual states then use these published standards to set allowable concentrations of pollutants in groundwater and surface water. At Fresh Kills, groundwater monitoring wells are installed at intervals of about feet in the shallow groundwater around each landfill mound, at feet in the groundwater zones downgradient of the mounds, and at 1, feet in the groundwater zones upgradient of the mounds. In total, there are groundwater monitoring wells at Fresh Kills, of which are shallow well, 61 are intermediate depth wells, and 61 are deep bedrock wells.
Groundwater monitoring is performed quarterly at each well. In addition to the groundwater monitoring plan, there is also a surface water monitoring program at Fresh Kills. This program includes annual surface water monitoring in Fresh Kills, Main, and Richmond Creeks within the landfill boundaries and a biennial monitoring program for their sediment quality. Surface water and sediment sampling is performed at a total of 14 sampling stations.
Four of these stations are also monitored for benthic ecology the study of organisms living in and on the sea floor at both the intertidal and subtidal zones. Was this information helpful?
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