Jack-booted Thugs Of AL State Agency Oppressed Landfill Owner After A Mere 20 Years Of Violations
After 20 years of repeated environmental citations, the Ashberry Landfill in rural Opp, Alabama, has finally been issued a civil penalty of $151,950 as part of a proposed Dec. 15 consent order issued by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM). ADEM officials appeared to crack down on Ashberry back in February, following years of citations but no fines, after another landfill outside Birmingham caught on fire and burned underground for months, putting ADEM in the spotlight and leading many community leaders asking how such a subterranean disaster could have happened.
But within weeks of that apparent enforcement crackdown, ADEM had conditionally approved a plan to allow operations at Ashberry to continue, taking 10 more months to finally levy a fine on the landfill for noncompliance this month. Even then, the agency chose to discount the fine by more than $30,000 “in the spirit of cooperation.” M. Lynn Battle, a spokesperson for ADEM, said in a statement that the department’s order included a corrective action plan with “a stringent timeline to remediate the environmental impacts” of violations. Ty Ashberry, the landfill’s owner, did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
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Ashberry Landfill was first granted a solid waste disposal permit in May 2003, according to state records. In the decades that followed, the landfill violated state environmental regulations again and again, promising eventual compliance while ADEM regulators did little to force the issues to resolution. ADEM issued its first notice of violation to Ashberry Landfill in July 2005 outlining its failure to comply with three state environmental regulations involving the maintenance of solid waste sites. Just three months later, the agency issued another notice of violation, this time outlining failure to comply with five regulations. Among the noted violations was use of the landfill for unpermitted household garbage and other waste, including automobile gas tanks, state documents. Neither notice of violation from 2005 resulted in a fine for the facility.
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In February 2022, ADEM issued its first administrative order against the facility, citing 11 separate violations of state environmental law. Still, the agency chose not to fine Ashberry. By May, ADEM received an additional complaint from a resident near the landfill. “There are tires piled up almost as high as the trees,” the complainant wrote. “Mosquitoes are so bad you can’t even go outside. My family owns that land, and I can’t even take my girls there because of the mosquitoes. My nieces are getting bit, even if they don’t go outside the mosquitoes are so bad…Something has to be done…Nothing is ever done. We have made complaints to people and NOTHING has been done.”
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And so on and so forth and so on and so forth . . ..
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21122023/alabama-lax-landfill-enforcement/
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