Photo: Brian Larson

City decides to dumb garbage on wetlands

Release Date:  Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Details:

By Kathy Andria

Sierra Club and American Bottom Conservancy have appealed the siting decision by the City of Madison to allow Waste Management of Illinois to construct a landfill within 2000 feet of Horseshoe Lake State Park and 2100 feet from the Cahokia Mounds World Heritage Site and National Historic Landmark boundaries. The new landfill would sit in Madison, on the other side of the Cahokia Canal from the Milam landfill in Fairmont City, along Interstate 70 just north of East St. Louis.

Prehistoric Indian remains and mounds eligible for listing on the National Historic Landmark Registry have been found at the site. The existing Milam landfill is already higher than Monks Mound, the tallest prehistoric mound in North America. Cahokia Mounds has been named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, joining such important sites as the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China.

Native Americans have pleaded with Waste Management and the City of Madison to put the landfill elsewhere. Waste Management says that archeology is “irrelevant.”

The site is also in the American Bottom floodplain and would require the destruction of 18 acres of wetlands. Waste Management wants to use the wetlands soil to cover garbage at the existing landfill. One acre of wetlands can hold more than a million gallons of floodwater/stormwater/snowmelt. FEMA just announced that the Metro East levees were vulnerable and may not hold. Landfills do not belong in floodplains.

Nor do landfills belong next to a state park where people fish, hunt, camp, picnic, observe nature and walk trails. The landfill would be open for at least 17 years, with noise and the putrid smell of rotting garbage interfering with families trying to enjoy recreational opportunities at the Horseshoe Lake State Park.

The landfill could also seek to expand as has the existing Milam landfill many times over.

Please write to tell the Illinois Pollution Control Board that the North Milam landfill would be incompatible with a state park, a World Heritage Site, in wetlands and in a floodplain. It is disrespectful to Native Americans and it also perpetuates the image of the East Side being the dumping ground for St. Louis. Sixty to 70 percent of the garbage at the giant Milam landfill on I-70 across from Gateway International Raceway has come from St. Louis.

Send your comments Re PCB 2007-084 by Sept. 12 to:
Clerk, Illinois Pollution Control Board
James R. Thompson Center
100 W. Randolph, Suite 11-500
Chicago, IL 60601

Or, by fax to 312-814-3669

For more information, see www.ipcb.state.il.us/Cool/External/CaseView2.asp?referer=coolsearch&case=13188

Or, call 618.567-0233 if you have questions.