Agenda - Council - 01/22/1979 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

City of Ramsey 15153 Nowthen Boulevard N.W.~ AnoVa, Minnesota 55303 · (612) 427-1410 December 27, 1978 Ms. Sandra Gardebring, Director Minnesota Pollution Control Agency 1935 West County Road B2 Roseville, Minnesota 55113 Dear Ms. 6ardebring: Through the past year our City Council has directed the attention of your Agency to what it feels is a severe shortcoming in the exercise of your responsibility for controlling ground water pollution. The case in point has been the. Anoka Landfill, which is located in th~ City of Ramsey. The latest episode in this effort is a letter dated December 3, 1978 over the signature of Mr. Thomas P. Clark, Chief, Enforcement Section, Division of Solid Waste. Mr. Clark in that letter refers to a meeting on November 9 and concludes in that letter that "in the Solid Waste Division staff's professional judgement, the Anoka Municipal Sanitary Landfill has not significantly influenced the water quality in the area. Furthermore, the current monitoring system appears adequate, providing data among wells is compared to each other, as well as to background data. Therefore, water monitorxng will continue as at present until such time as the results in- dicate that changes in the current monitoring system are justified." Surely, Mr. Clark knows that this landfill was started several years before any monitoring effort was initiated and therefore, there is no background information on ground water quality against which any scientifically valid comparison can be made. In the cburse of the November 9th meeting, your representatives stated that since monitoring Well #S was somewhat isolated from the landfill and is the newest of the monitoring wells, it has been viewed by your Agency as the "control" well. This means that its quality has been accepted as the stan- dard of ground water quality in the area and that deterioration of ground water by landfill leachate is indicated only if samples from the other mon~ itoring wells show greater levels of the measured constituents than samples from Well #5. Samples from Well #$ have consistently shown levels of nitrate nitrogen near or in excess of the maximum permissible level for drinking water and have consistently shown higher levels of chloride than either the levels in other monitoring wells or levels that would normally be expected in shallow ground water. hhen City representatives pointed to the unlikely prospect that ground water in Ramsey does not normally meet drinking water standards, your representatives agreed.