No. 3 of 2011: Methane Gas Spreads Outside Landfills

• Editor's note: This is the eighth of the 10-part countdown of the top stories on Geneva Patch in 2011. These 10 are my choices. At the end of each story, you'll get a chance to pick your own top story. I strongly encourage you to click on the links to the original story or stories, because that's where you'll find the real fun in this trip down memory lane.

Since we're running this particular "Top 10 Stories of 2011" article on Jan. 1, I thought it would be appropriate to include a little "look ahead."

There is no way that the ranks as the No. 3 story of the year. I probably should have replaced it with the Fermilab Tevatron closing, the Delnor/DCH merger or the Max/Karen Dobner synthetic drugs story.

But since this series is primarily a just-for-fun intellectual exercise, I thought I'd toss the methane onto the table along with a little perspective.

I was working for The Geneva Republican back in the 1980s when local officials and Waste Management were talking about creating Settler's Hill Landfill, and methane was one of the concerns back then. Another biggy was the potential—over time—of leachate into the aquifer.

"Leachate" and "aquifer" sound like a couple of Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy words, but what that last sentence boils down to is bad stuff—contaminents like methane, carbon dioxide, organic acids, aldehydes, alcohols and simple sugars—getting into your groudwater. In Geneva's case, we're talking about our well water and ultimately, the Fox River.

When it was built, Settler's Hill was state of the art. It was really Waste Management's prototype. The company's best minds wanted to put the environmental monitoring lab right there on the site at Kirk Road and Fabyan Parkway and, after buildout, produce a first-class recreational site, showing that a landfill in a relatively well-populated area could be a boon for the community.

As I recall (and I could be wrong), Waste Management ponied up some of the money to build Elfstrom Stadium, recently renamed . The 18-hole Settler's Hill Golf Course was constructed on the landfill property, and Geneva has benefitted from using that methane gas to generate electric power.

There's a lot at stake for Waste Management, and that was one of Settler's Hills' selling points. Officials who enticed WM here in the first place—among them Geneva Mayor Dick Lewis and Kane County Board Chairman Phil Elfstrom—knew they'd get the company's full attention regarding any environmental-safety issues.

You can read a lot more, by the way, by visiting Waste Management's excellent website here.

What's a little less known—and maybe a little more environmentally worrisome—is that there is a second, older landfull that's not as modern or well-protected as Settler's Hill. Midway Landfill was literally a "dump," way back when. It is located north of Fabyan Parkway in the area of the former Kane County Jail and adjacent to the Settler's Hill facility.

What's almost-equally scary is that my local journalism career has lasted more years than the lifetime of a landfill. While I'm not thrilled about being the Methuselah of local news editors, it is kind of interesting to be around long enough to see the "before" and "after."

Leachate was the big worry then. And there isn't enough money in any environmental superfund to solve a leachate issue if it were to happen now.

Don't sound the alarm bells. Don't fly into a panic. From all we've seen so far in the past three weeks, and with any luck, this story will turn out to be just a blip on a probe. To their credit, Kane County officials and Waste management have been on top of this from Day One. They've bent over backwards to inform area public-safety and civic leaders and—at least since the Dec. 20 —they've done a superb job of communicating with the public. (See the city of Batavia and city of Geneva websites.)

As I said earlier, the spread of methane gas outside the landfills' footprints doesn't truly qualify for Top 10 story status, but it is something that merits close monitoring in 2012.

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