“The Coakley Landfill on New Hampshire’s Seacoast is back in the headlines, more than 30 years after it became a Superfund site.
Neighbors are again worried the site could be poisoning their drinking water, after a rash of childhood cancer cases nearby and the discovery of dangerously high levels of PFAS chemicals at the landfill.
That’s despite local officials’ promises that the landfill is safe, under control and not a threat to nearby residents. In fact, they say the landfill is mostly just misunderstood…
‘It started out as a quarry which had been exhausted of materials, so that it was a big hole in the ground – a really big hole in the ground,’ Sullivan says.
For years, this really big hole sat carved out of bare bedrock. Landfills in the 1970s weren’t lined underneath, or covered above. Coakley collected household, industrial and municipal waste from nearby towns including Portsmouth, from factories and the old Pease Air Force Base…
But lots of contaminants – including dioxins, mercury and arsenic – were leaching out of the landfill through groundwater, and in the early 1980s, they started turning up in people’s wells.
The state shut down the landfill in 1985, and a year later, it became one of the nation’s first Superfund sites – a federally managed toxic waste cleanup area.
Now, it’s covered in thick, dry grass, studded with metal and plastic pipes poking out of the ground. Some vent gas to keep the landfill from exploding. Others go all the way down to the groundwater, to monitor the contamination…
This whole system is part of the remedy the Environmental Protection Agency chose for Coakley in the 1990s.
It involved a standard procedure – piling the waste up and covering it with the thick, impermeable cap that forms the grassy hill we’re standing on. The next part of the plan called for long-term monitoring, while expecting the toxins to fade away on their own.
Also standard at a Superfund with multiple contributors was the group formed by the towns and businesses responsible for the pollution: the Coakley Landfill Group. They’d be in charge of paying for and carrying out the cleanup, per the EPA’s instructions…
Once the cap was finished in the late 1990s, this once-chaotic Superfund site went quiet.
Most neighbors were connected to public water, and over time, they stopped talking about Coakley. New families moved in who didn’t even know the landfill was there…
To Sullivan, Coakley is a model Superfund – a safe, secure, success story.
But in 2016, all of that came into question when PFAS contamination turned up at Coakley as part of routine tests…
The chemicals were found at high levels in surface waters along the edges of the landfill. Their discovery came just as PFAS began to make headlines in New Hampshire and nationwide.
The EPA had put out an advisory limit on the chemicals, which soon became law in New Hampshire.
Also that spring, the state had found a cluster of cancer cases on the Seacoast. Now, neighbors worried Coakley – and PFAS – were to blame…
There were only about a dozen cases, but it was enough to count as an official double cancer cluster. And Lane was desperate to know whether her kids were at risk. So she started reading more.
‘Underneath one of the articles was just a comment from a public citizen that said, ‘Coakley?” she says. ‘And I was like, ‘Coakley, what the heck is Coakley?’ So I started Googling it.’
What she found was a landfill-turned-toxic waste cleanup site just on the other side of the woods in her backyard.”
Read the full article by Annie Ropeik