[V]ermont waste management behemoth Casella is being sued for polluting a scenic river in the White Mountains.
Toxics Action Center and Conservation Law Foundation filed a citizen suit Monday in the U.S. District Court of New Hampshire against Casella Waste Systems and a subsidiary, North Country Environmental Services, for violating the federal Clean Water Act.
The groups claim that a drainage channel constructed by the firm is funneling polluted water from a landfill in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, into the Ammonoosuc, a 60-mile river that flows west from Mount Washington’s Lake of the Clouds.
The landfill operator, NCES, reconstructed an unwalled 370-foot drainage channel in 2010 that naturally seeps from the landfill toward the river, where it deposits water and pollutants picked up along the way, according to the lawsuit.
The two environmental advocacy groups claim that the landfill operators never applied for a federally mandated permit for the discharge of contaminated groundwater and landfill leachate, water that contains suspended or dissolved solids.
“Anyone that’s discharging in this way has an obligation under the Clean Water Act to apply for a permit for that discharge, so the onus is on the companies to apply for that permit,” said Kevin Budris, an attorney for the National Environmental Law Center, the nonprofit that filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Budris said his clients want Casella and NCES to halt the flow of contaminated water from the drainage channel into the Ammonoosuc, or to apply for proper federal permits if they plan to continue discharging polluted water into the river. The lawsuit also seeks for Casella and NCES to remediate any past pollution from the drainage channel.
The EPA requires companies who “discharge from a point source into the waters of the United States” to obtain a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit.
Budris cited as evidence of pollution the water quality monitoring data submitted by Casella to comply with New Hampshire law. Testing results in both the drainage channel and river show elevated levels of the heavy metals manganese and iron and 1-4, dioxane, a possible carcinogen often found in landfills. The levels downstream from the landfill were higher than those upstream.
Joe Fusco, vice president of Casella, said in an email Thursday that the lawsuit amounted to “tiresome political theater” by “agenda-driven groups.”
“We will, of course, vigorously defend ourselves against these baseless claims as well, as our NCES landfill is operated in compliance with our permits and regulations governing these facilities,” Fusco wrote.
For residents of Bethlehem, a town of 2,526 with the moniker “Star of the White Mountains,” the question of what to do about their town’s 46.5-acre landfill has been a point of contention for years. Bethlehem residents have voted twice in the past two years against a proposed 100-acre expansion of the landfill, according to Woody Little, an organizer with the Toxics Action Network.
During the last vote, which occurred this March, 600 residents voted against landfill expansion and 500 voted in favor of expansion, showing a town divided between a desire for more jobs and tax revenue on one hand, and the risk of more pollution on the other.
“They’ve got a pattern of acquiring struggling dumps, promising to make the situation better and then they just expand and expand, dividing communities,” said Little.
Bethlehem is not the only New England town that has battled over a Casella-run landfill within its borders.
Residents of Southbridge, Massachusetts, voted in 2017 against expansion of a 95-acre Casella-owned landfill in their town after the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection had found evidence of landfill contaminants in 15 drinking water wells in a nearby town. Casella then decided to close the landfill.
Casella also runs Vermont’s lone operating landfill, located in Coventry. Casella applied for a permit last year for a 52-acre expansion of that landfill, which has met state requirements and will soon go through a public review process, according to Cathy Jamieson, head of Vermont’s Solid Waste Management Program.
