Loudon County solid waste commission hears progress report on landfill closure, approves Sept. 6 closure for staff rodeo

The Loudon County Solid Waste Commission received a substantive operations update on the county landfill, including timelines for partial closure and capping work, leachate-tank repairs, stormwater-pond remediation and a plan to capture and euthanize a large number of vultures, and voted to close the landfill on Sept. 6 to allow employees to attend a heavy-equipment rodeo.

The vote to close the landfill for the rodeo was made and approved during the meeting; no roll-call tally was recorded in the transcript. Commission members discussed signage and customer notification; staff said signage had been up for two weeks and Saturday customers had been contacted.

The meeting focused chiefly on construction and environmental controls intended to move the landfill closer to partial and full closure. Republic (the landfill operator) and consultants reported the county’s closure plan has been revised since 2022: an earlier expansion of about 13 acres has been reduced to about 10.2 acres, and that change requires reworking closure sequencing and related engineering plans. Consultants warned that delays increase both Republic’s closure costs and the commission’s post-closure expenses; one example given was a roughly $7 million increase tied to rising materials and related costs cited for a single year’s change in the closure cost projections.

Technical work under way or planned includes: completing cell construction for Module 1, installing the liner for Module 2 (with module 2 liner work expected to start the week after the meeting), and finishing a slip-line project on a gravity line that is being held up by one missing plug. Staff and contractors estimated an early-to-mid-September target for finishing the slip line and completing the leachate-collection riser that follows. The project schedule in the meeting paired cell construction, slip-line work and leachate-collection completion as sequential steps.

Leachate and tank compliance were discussed in…