Dump as Landmark Isn’t a Waste

A few miles west of town, surrounded by orchards, vineyards and a ranch advertising “fat pigs for sale,” a mile-long, 6-story-tall mountain of barren, blanched dirt looms up over the landscape. Buried beneath this dirt mountain is a half-century of Fresno garbage, 79 million cubic yards of milk cartons, disposable diapers, grass clippings, watermelon rinds, broken furniture, the occasional dead dog and who knows what else.

This is the Fresno Sanitary Landfill, which last week was jolted from obscurity to give the nation a good giggle. It began Monday, when Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced that the Fresno landfill had been designated, along with 14 other sites, as a National Historic Landmark.

“These special sites,” Norton declared, “underscore our heritage and tell stories of periods and events in our history.”

Humorists of all stripes could not contain themselves, treating the notion that a dump might be historic as the funniest thing since poor Dan Quayle tried to spell “potato.” For one night anyway, the chattering birdbrains of talk television chattered about something other than Gary Condit. And environmentalists pounced, linking the Bush administration’s designation of the dump with its desire to drill for oil in the wilds of Alaska.

“This is what the Bush administration undoubtedly would like to do to the entire state of California,” Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an Associated Press account of the fiasco. “Trench it, compact it and shovel dirt over it.”

Within hours of the announcement, the designation was withdrawn, pending, of course, “further review.” (Read: maybe in the next century.) The designators, went the official explanation, had not known that the landfill, closed now for a decade, had been identified as a toxic Superfund site. Maybe they had missed the sign outside the facility that identifies it in big letters as the “Fresno Sanitary Landfill SUPERFUND Site.”

Most likely, the decision to rescind was simply a political retreat, and that’s a pity. There was and is a valid case to be made for this dump and its place in history. Martin V. Melosi, the University of Houston professor who has written extensively on the topic of garbage, and who recommended the Fresno site for historical consideration, said he understood going in that promoting a landfill as history might seem “exotic.”

Still, he said, trash and how to dispose of it has been a major theme of civic debate as long as there have been cities: “Waste is part of the process of living and we can’t ignore it. We have to deal with it in some way. Waste also tells us what we value and what we don’t. What we keep we call antiques. What we throw away we call garbage.”

As Melosi has written in his book “Garbage in the Cities,” America awoke in the 1920s from the Industrial Revolution to discover it was overrun with rubbish. City halls around the country confronted the question of what to do with all the trash: Burn it, dump it in holes, feed it to pigs, toss it into the nearest body of water or chuck it over the backyard fence?

Fresno had been hotly debating garbage for 15 years when Public Works Commissioner Jean Vincenz proposed a city-owned landfill, where trash would be placed in trenches, compacted and then covered with dirt. A private company had been collecting the trash, but there had been complaints of laggardly service, foul smells and excessive smoke from incinerators. In defending his proposal, Vincenz at one meeting offered to take critics around California on a tour of the garbage-collection methods employed by other cities.

“I won’t make a speech,” he said, “but let the flies there speak for themselves.”

And so Fresno developed its landfill, and according to Melosi, it became a national prototype, the preferred method for dealing with urban garbage, eliminating the smelly smoke and rat infestations generated by other processes. Vincenz became the toast of municipal engineers, serving as president of the American Public Works Assn., as an international consultant, and until his retirement, as director of public works for San Diego County.

He died in 1989, two years after his “legacy to the city,” as one trade publication called the Fresno landfill, had been closed down after a half-century of operation. “About 80% of what he did holds true today,” Fresno’s solid waste manager said at the time of the closing. There was quite a different sort of tale, though, in that other 20%.

What happened in Fresno also happened at many other landfills: Toxins leached into the ground water, gases bubbled out of the dirt. In response to such poisonings--especially the toxic disaster at Love Canal in upstate New York--came the federal Superfund program.

Critics argued last week that it was folly to designate the Fresno landfill as “historic” because it was also a Superfund site. Their reasoning seemed suspect. First of all, wasn’t a national initiative to tackle chemical poisoning a good thing? And doesn’t the fact that the Fresno site itself has been cleaned up and soon will become a huge community sports complex only enhance its historical narrative?

Yes, Vincenz and other pioneers miscalculated the potential for landfill leakage, causing loads of environmental damage. Those blunders, however, led not only to better landfill design, not only to the Superfund effort--historic in its own right--but also to a greater societal emphasis on reusable materials and waste recycling.

Societies learn as much from their stumbles as their strides forward, and mistakes are a major part of history. Consider just a few of the 129 California sites already designated as National Historic Landmarks:

There is the Manzanar War Relocation Center, and certainly by now the case has been made that locking away Japanese American citizens during World War II was a mistake. . . .

There is the Ahwahnee in Yosemite Valley, and I doubt many Sierra Club members today would support construction of a pricey resort, however splendid, in the middle of California’s greatest natural treasure. . . .

There is Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, where the good Capt. John Sutter developed the practice of feeding natives who worked his fields out of a trough, like cattle, 1,000 “head” at a feeding--a serious ethical “mistake,” I’d say.

History, as California historian Josiah Royce observed long ago, is “neither for babes nor for sentimentalists.”

Let’s demand a recount.