Once-Foul Bailard Landfill Strives to Prove It Has Cleaned Up Its Act

Every workday, Bailard Landfill workers face 400 to 500 trash trucks, 1,400 tons of trash and 3,000 marauding sea gulls.

Day’s end sees the trucks gone, the trash covered with dirt and the sea gulls at rest.

The stinking, methane-laden gases of decay that until last summer bubbled up from the rotting trash are now pumped to a power plant across Victoria Avenue and burned, converted to electricity to power 1,000 Oxnard homes.

Leaking fluid is pumped away and treated. Stray bits of paper are gone, picked up by hand crews for later disposal.

What remains is a massive, smooth-looking earthen hill, 58 feet high, with a faint, dust-masked odor of decay.

It was not always this clean.

The county’s largest, oldest operating landfill began life in 1961, opened by members of the Bailard and Van Wingerden families and run by their company, Ventura Refuse Disposal.

For 14 years, it was one of the county’s main public dumps, where trash of all description was simply left to rot, say officials of the Ventura Regional Sanitation District, who now run it.

“It was a dump, a regular dump,” said Mark Bailey, superintendent of solid waste operations for the district. “You couldn’t even run heavy equipment across it--it’d sink clean out of sight.”

Then in 1975, the county revoked the landfill’s conditional use permit and ordered it shut down for exposed trash, illegal dumping of oil and other violations of health and environmental laws.

In the late 1970s, the Ventura Regional Sanitation District began negotiating a dollar-a-year lease with the owners in exchange for cleaning up the Bailard site and obtained a permit to reopen it.

After capping the dump with a foot of dirt, draining it and installing pipes to collect the gas and liquids, the district reopened the landfill in 1989.

Now it accepts 1,400 tons of trash per day from western Ventura County residents who, district officials say, still don’t understand the place.

“A lot of people are gullible,” said John Conaway, solid waste director for the district. “What they know about landfills ain’t no good. They don’t realize the amount of money we put in these landfills to make them environmentally safe.”

Just inside the gate, Bailard’s recycling center collects castoff kitchen appliances, accepts used motor oil, and grinds tree stumps down to chips for sale to a Delano power plant. Workers use machines to pierce refrigerator plumbing and suck out Freon gas for recycling, in a process known as “vampiring.”

Workers stop trash trucks at random and check their loads for hazardous waste such as paint, batteries and antifreeze. Materials such as those are recycled, when possible, or shipped to a hazardous waste incinerator in Eldorado, Ark., said Gary Haden, the district’s solid waste operations manager.

For every 12 days of operation by the wood-grinding operation alone, one day’s worth of landfill space is saved, Haden said.

“We take wood, dry brush, stumps and packing crates,” Haden said. “When (Operation) Desert Storm sent stuff back from the Gulf, we got a lot of packing crates.”

Atop the landfill, district workers shove the dumped trash around with huge machines--a bulldozer and an articulated, spike-wheeled tractor known as a compactor.

The machines crush the trash to a uniform density of about 1,400 pounds per cubic yard and move it into that day’s “cell,” a sloped mound of compacted trash 18 feet deep, 80 long and 70 feet wide.

Meanwhile, a half-million-dollar machine called a scraper picks up clean fill dirt trucked in from as far away as Calabasas and spreads it out, outlining and eventually covering the cell in dirt six inches deep. A new day begins a new cell.

The smell, says compactor operator Robert Ordonez, is not nearly as bothersome as when he first began work there more than 20 years ago.

Now 65, he is ready, but reluctant, to retire.

“It’s a pretty good experience. . . . I really enjoy the work,” Ordonez said during a break, over the rolling roar of his colleagues’ diesels. “I’m so used to trash that I’m going to miss the work, the environment.”

Like other district workers, he is proud of what he does and how he works in tight synchronization with the others.

“You’ve got to know how to do it, of course,” said the Oxnard man. “I know what he’s doing, he knows what I’m doing.”

Nearby, hundreds of sea gulls swooped and pecked at the trash as they have since the landfill reopened, despite district officials’ efforts to scare them off.

“Gary has tried everything to get rid of them,” Conaway said. “We’ve tried carbide guns, scare cartridges, wires stretched across the landfill, kites, weather balloons. We recorded the sound of a sea gull in distress and played that to them.”

He laughed. “We had kites tied up on the end of poles, predator bird shapes, and the wind would die and they’d fall to the ground and the gulls would try to mate with them.”

Unable to make the gulls go away, the district finally built them a pond near the landfill to keep them from straying toward houses farther inland, he said.

He shrugged. As long as the landfill is there, so will be the gulls, he said.

Even if the landfill closes on Dec. 7, another one will have to be built somewhere.

“The bad thing about the industry is that it’s so efficient, no one even understands it,” Conaway said.

Most people think, “ ‘It’s gone, it’s disposed of for me, I don’t have to worry about it any more,’ ” said Rob Baskin, a district maintenance worker. “If more people would come out and see our operation and what we do, they’d have a better understanding of it.”