Friends, KSL will never take accountability for their failure of operations. They continue to point the finger at others and claim that your calls to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection are baseless and falsely reported.
KSL General Manager, Dan O'Brien, says that in a perfect world the best solution would be for humans to produce less waste, but until that happens, landfills are the next best solution. Solid point. But in a perfect world, there would also be limits to how much waste one mega-landfill located next to homes, schools and parks can accept. In a perfect world, there would be ongoing third party health studies to ensure no harm beyond the boundaries of the landfill. In a perfect world, there would be very strict rules regarding where landfills can be located and when they have moved beyond being a service to society and into being the biggest health threat to a community. Put simply, KSL is destroying our quality of life and every day they continue to expand, is a countdown to the death of our beautiful region.
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Pat Clark, a leader of Friends of Lackawanna, which formed in 2014 in opposition of the landfill and its now-approved expansion, characterized the response as a failure of both the landfill and the state to regulate it. He criticized the “never-ending bites at the apples or redos that landfills get to fix things that they cause without any repercussions” and questioned when the cycle would end.
“The failures start with, as is always the case, ‘This isn’t us, but by the way, here’s how we’re going to fix it,’” Clark said. “They continue to talk out of both sides of their mouth every time they issue a letter.”
Clark also took issue with the DEP using self-monitoring data from the landfill.
“DEP should be doing a proactive job to protect the citizens, put the continuous monitoring plans in place and own the systems and the data themselves instead of relying on the facility that they’re trying to police to report the data to them,” he said.
Asked about the landfill’s letter referring to his organization as agitators, Clark said, “The landfill’s been calling us a lot worse than agitators for a decade now, so we’re fine with that. I would propose, though, that if the landfill is such proactive stewards of our environment, why is it only when notices of violation and public outreach reaches a critical level do they then take the steps to fix things?”
Over the past year, the DEP has sent the landfill three notices of violation related to odors, totaling 14 individual violations. In November, the DEP also blamed uncontrolled odors when it suspended the landfill’s ability to remove the cover from existing piles of garbage that had naturally settled to bring the trash piles back up to their original height and reclaim “lost air space,” though the suspension affected less than 10 acres of the landfill.