
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 3, 1990                   TAG: 9005030530
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

KIM-STAN: LAST ACT OF SMELLY DRAMA?

IT HAS TAKEN the commonwealth of Virginia an unconscionably long time to move against the owners of the Kim-Stan landfill in Alleghany County. Attorney General Mary Sue Terry asked the local Circuit Court judge this week to shut Kim-Stan down. In a separate proceeding, a hearing officer has recommended that the state's Department of Waste Management revoke the landfill's permit as soon as possible.

This comes after many months of controversy during which the landfill's operators have trucked in and buried countless tons of solid waste - much if not most of that, it appears, in an environmentally careless manner.

The garbage is piled high. At a hearing before an administrative law judge a month ago, Kim-Stan representatives made a remarkable string of admissions. Among them: The site is not a good one for a landfill; when the state began, months ago, to try shutting Kim-Stan down, the owners accelerated their deposits of garbage from Northeastern U.S. cities; sometimes the operators have failed to keep waste covered with dirt; the dump ought to be closed soon.

With all that, former Kim-Stan consultant William Kozuh - the only witness for the operation - wasn't admitting wrongdoing. Indeed, he asserted that putting in more garbage makes the landfill safer because it absorbs polluted water and directs it to a leachate collection system.

State experts contradicted this. A State Water Control Board investigator said the dump's leachate into nearby streams had caused the worst oxygen depletion he'd ever seen. Even the stormwater ditch, supposed to carry clean runoff, was said to be polluting rainwater in "fantastic" amounts in the few hundred yards where it crosses the property.

Oh, that, said Kozuh. It's from iron deposits that God put in the soil. Joe Roberts, Wise County lawyer who recently began representing Kim-Stan, dismissed as negligible a thousand or so gallons of pollutants added daily to the Jackson River: "It disappears just like that." The only reason the commonwealth is going after Kim-Stan, he asserted, is that it's bringing in garbage from out of state.

Kim-Stan's arrogance and nearly a year of legal maneuvering have bought the dump time that it should never have had. But it has been aided in this by the state's foot-dragging. This drama could at last be moving toward its final act. The spectators in Alleghany County have been a captive audience; otherwise they'd long since have exited, holding their noses.

by CNB