Old City Dumps Are Still Burning Issue in Oceanside

Out at the baseball fields along Maxson Street in Oceanside, folks say they burn up the diamond on occasion. Literally.

It is not the prowess of the players, however, that scorches the crabgrass. Local lore has it that an unwary spectator can toss a match onto the field after lighting a cigarette and, if the ocean breeze has died and conditions are just right, be greeted by a sudden puff of bluish flame bursting from the ground.

That sort of supernatural phenomenon has a logical explanation. Deep beneath the baseball diamonds at Maxson Street is an abandoned municipal dump. As the soggy newspapers, milk cartons and other trash buried in the landfill begin to decompose, flammable methane gas percolates to the surface.

Such earthbound pyrotechnics aside, the old Maxson Street dump has been something of a municipal migraine for Oceanside.

Tons of Dirt on Top

Since the landfill was shut down in 1971, city workers have deposited tons of dirt on the site to fill in the mammoth depressions that form as the garbage rots away beneath the topsoil. In some spots, earth has been deposited up to 30 feet deep in an unending battle against the subsidence problem, city officials say.

On two occasions in the past five years, a pair of roads that run through the area were totally reconstructed by city workers because of the sinking earth. At the one ball field that lies directly over the landfill, city landscape crews gave up their grass-growing efforts more than a decade ago because the water lines sank too deep and had to be jettisoned.

Understandably, the landfill’s neighbors have been less than pleased. The owners of a nearby 90-unit apartment complex sued the city and the developer of the project, complaining that the leaking methane threatened residents and the sinking ground caused a solid brick wall to topple and the parking lot to crack. The legal battle culminated in a $475,000 jury award to the complex owner in October, 1985, although the ruling is on appeal.

Still wary of the gas peril, the apartment operator has installed methane detectors in ground-floor units. The special warning devices, which look similar to a store-bought smoke detector, sound a horn when dangerously high concentrations of methane are present.

Among Worst in County

Local air quality officials say the Maxson Street dump is among the most notorious in San Diego County, spewing out large quantities of gasses.

“If we had a category called the dirty half-dozen, this one would likely make it based on the information we have to date,” said Richard Smith, deputy director of the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District.

Indeed, city officials readily admit that the retired dump has not been a joy to work with.

“Maxson Street has been a real problem for the city,” said Glenn Prentice, the city public works director who inherited responsibility for the landfill when he came to work for Oceanside five years ago. “It’s a real headache. But we’re not the only community that has this legacy. There are dumps like this all over the country.”

Prentice and other city officials acknowledge that little can be done about the sinking earth other than to keep filling in the holes, but they hope the ticklish methane problem can be solved with a $513,000 gas extraction system they expect to be in place by late August.

Network of Pipes and Wells

An elaborate network of plastic pipes and wells sunk deep into the garbage, the extraction system will be connected to a pair of seven-horsepower vacuum pumps designed to suck the methane away before it has a chance to reach the surface. Monitoring wells have also been dug along the perimeter of the landfill to make sure methane isn’t trickling off the site.

Initially, the methane will be pumped to an oversized pilot light across the street from the landfill where it will be burned harmlessly in the air. Prentice, however, plans ultimately to set up a system that will use the burning gas to heat a nearby public pool.

Oceanside officials never dreamed that such elaborate steps would have to be taken when they first began dumping trash into the open canyon beside Maxson Street in the late 1950s. In those days, the canyon was on the edge of town, a far-flung outpost that seemed the perfect spot for a smelly dump.

Today, the site has been encircled by homes and apartments, a golf course and supermarket, the Boy’s Club and a senior citizens center.

Aside from the green grass and chain link fences marking two of the three baseball fields on the landfill, the 12-acre site looks like a scene from nuclear winter.

The topsoil is swept clean of vegetation, pockmarked by slight depressions where the garbage beneath is beginning to give way. Large piles of dirt, dumped on the site by building contractors who need a place to dispose of the soil, sit waiting to be spread across the parcel like another layer of frosting on a fast-sinking cake.

Another 15 or More Years

Prentice said he expects the land to continue subsiding and spewing methane for at least an additional 15 years. But other experts say the landfill could continue to slump for much longer, making it a virtual no man’s land well into the 21st Century.

“It could continue for 50 or 60 years,” said Craig Cording, who is supervising design work on the gas extraction system for Long Beach-based SCS Engineers. “Any structures you put on it are going to be in trouble unless you drilled through all the garbage. You’re always going to have that settling to contend with.”

Some sections of the dump have not even begun to decompose. As work crews dug trenches during the past few months for the methane recovery system, they unearthed newspapers dating as far back as 1962 that had not started rotting.

While operators of landfills today take state-of-the-art steps to ease future subsidence problems, workers at the Maxson Street dump were not so sophisticated. They simply spread the garbage out and then piled more trash on top, day after day, month after month, until the entire canyon was filled to capacity.

“These landfills were the ‘in’ technology of the time,” Prentice said. “Now we’re realizing the effects of it.”

But the Maxson Street landfill is not the only abandoned dump that has given Oceanside problems. An even greater public outcry occurred over an old dump along Mission Avenue, where leaking methane prompted the evacuation of three schools in October, 1981.

City Acted Quickly

The city acted quickly to install a methane recovery system in 1982 and, since then, the plumbing has worked relatively well to purge the soil of methane. Schoolchildren returned to the site in September, 1982, and administrators have had just a handful of complaints in the years since, according to Dan Armstrong, the district’s press spokesman.

In March of this year, that episode came to an end as the district and city hammered out a $125,000 settlement of a lawsuit filed by the schools demanding reimbursement for the cost of relocating pupils to other campuses for the bulk of the 1981-82 school year.

“I wouldn’t even go so far as to classify the dump as a nuisance anymore,” Armstrong said. “There are days when you can still smell it, but that’s a scant reminder of the way it used to be. It used to stink.”

While attention in the city was focused on the Mission Avenue landfill, the Maxson Street dump was quietly forging its own reputation.

Owners of the large apartment complex sitting on the edge of the old dump say they first began to experience problems soon after they bought the building in 1978. The parking lot started to develop foot-deep fissures. A block wall separating the building from the landfill began leaning precariously. Ultimately, a section of the bricks tore loose and toppled over.

“It’s absolutely astonishing when you think about it,” said Leo Papas, a San Diego attorney who represents Immelmann Venture Ltd., the partnership that owns the building. “That landfill is like a sponge underneath. As it sank, all the support for my client’s property disappeared and it tore away.”

While Oceanside officials don’t dispute those facts, they maintain the apartment owners have exaggerated the landfill’s effect on the property. “In all honesty, it’s not as big a problem as they’re claiming,” said Dennis Daley, an Encinitas attorney handling the case for the city.

Poor Planning Cited

Daley said the complex’s builder should have taken into account the potential for subsidence while planning the apartment building but acknowledged that the city accepts responsibility for solving problems with the leaking methane.

As Papas sees it, any solution to the methane problem would be none too soon. A finger of the canyon runs directly under the apartment complex, creating a natural pathway for the gasses, he said. But while the methane warning alarms have gone off on occasion in the apartments of some residents, the gas has not caused any long-term disruptions, Papas said.

Aside from the methane, Papas worries that seemingly benign household compounds dumped in the landfill could react together like “a witches’ caldron,” sending toxic fumes percolating into the air.

Smith of the Air Pollution Control District said such a scenario is within the realm of possibility, noting that contaminanted gasses can be chemically created by pesticides and other products or by industrial toxics dumped into a landfill unbeknownst to its operators.

“The real concern we have is over the health effects of any gasses that may be carried out with the methane,” Smith said, adding that a “laundry list” of potentially dangerous chemicals such as benzene, vinyl chloride, ethylene dibromide and perchloroethylene have been found at municipal landfills.

There has been no detailed chemical analysis of the vapors emitted by the dumps in Oceanside, or at other landfills throughout the county. That task will be tackled during the coming year as the region’s Air Pollution Control District gears up to follow new state regulations for testing the air around dumps, Smith said.

If anything, residents of the apartment complex seem unperturbed by life on the edge of a landfill.

Gas No Great Concern

“It’s been cool,” said Terry Walker, a young mother who has lived in an upstairs unit overlooking the Maxson Street landfill for three years. “We’ve had no problems.”

Johnnie Carr, 21, has lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor for the past year with her husband, a lance corporal at Camp Pendleton, and their toddler son.

“The gas has been no great concern,” said Carr, noting how the apartment manager required the couple to sign a statement notifying them about the leaking methane before they even filled out an application to rent the unit. “It’s something we thought about as a possibility, but it’s not something we’ve worried about.”

Despite such calm, Oceanside officials are eager to see the methane extraction system in place and working properly. While methane is not a highly volatile gas, it can explode if mixed in the proper concentrations with air.

Papas said he has heard of an incident in which a house more than 500 feet from a landfill exploded when it filled with methane and was ignited by a spark. Smith recalled how a heavy equipment operator working beside an abandoned dump near Balboa Park was blown off his backhoe by the force of a methane explosion.

The Oceanside Fire Department has been called to Maxson Street on at least two occasions to put out small methane fires that were started by sparks in the base of light standards or one of the electric scoreboards, Oceanside officials say. Smith said his agency received a report that a crack in the parking lot at the dump lit up when someone tossed a cigarette butt down.

Nonetheless, even the methane extraction system offers no guarantees, the experts say. Cording, who is overseeing installation of the contraption, said that if too much vacuum is created by the pumps, it can actually ignite a fire beneath the ground.

“If this system is not properly monitored, these underground fires can basically start themselves,” Cording said. “Nothing’s fail-safe, but if the city monitors the system properly, it shouldn’t happen.”