MALVERN, Iowa (KMTV) — Residents around the Loess Hills Regional Landfill near Malvern, Iowa know about the problem.
Trash from the landfill, and from trucks coming and going, ends up alongside the highway and in neighbors' yards and farmland.
Residents of a community north of the landfill say it's been an issue for a while, but was the worst it's ever been was this weekend, with the strong winds.
"I don't want it to look like I live in a landfill," said a resident of that community, Susie Koutnik. But she has other concerns, too.
"I'm more concerned this is going to impact wildlife," she said. "It's going to impact the water supply; there's a creek (behind my house)."
Farmer and member of the Board of Supervisors Richard Crouch has lived and worked land west of the landfill since the early '70s when operations began.
"There's only so much the county can do," Crouch said.
The highway is state-owned, he said, and county transferred ownership of a road leading to the privately-owned landfill to it.
He said part of of the problem is trucks coming and going properly securing their load.
He said some "don't seem to care what they're doing to the countryside."
"They have a tarp on them, but it's not sealed down like a grain truck," Crouch observed.
The landfill says the weekend's event was an isolated incident made possible by the severe wind. It said it closed early Saturday due to the wind but had crews working all day Saturday and Sunday to clean.
Below is the e-mail response as provided by Justin Franks with the landfill:
"We had crews working from 7 am Saturday and Sunday tell dark and will continue that until it is clean. We actually closed the landfill early on Saturday due to the winds.
We have reached out to the DOT for help with the trees on the state property for the bags we cant reach and Waste Connections is hiring a tree company to get bags if there are any out of the trees around the house.
We have 1200' of 12' tall fencing on the north portion of the property to protect the fields, highway and houses to the north. We also have 20 portable wind screens that are 18' tall that we use to surround the dumping area to try and contain litter from blowing during daily operations. We also have hundreds of feet of what we call temp fence which is 4-5' tall chain link that we install strategically to assist with catching litter as it blows across the ground before it gets to the perimeter fence.
As you are well aware it has been unusually windy towards the end of winter and beginning of spring.
On the truck side of things when it is blowing out on the highway those aren’t our trucks but we have contacted their companies telling them that they must fix their equipment if there is an issue with it. We have also asked the DOT and Sheriffs to write tickets to trucks that do litter the roadway because it is an issues.
We have a full-time employee whose job is just to drive the highway and pick up trash coming from vehicles that don’t even belong to our company.
We try to go above and beyond but with an act of God wind event like we had this past Friday afternoon into Saturday you can only do so much that is why we closed on Saturday and have to pick up the litter that it caused.
This wind event was extremely bad with wind speed reported by the national weather service in the 50s' and 60mph range...
We as a company had already reached out this morning to the local board of supervisors, DOT and the IDNR to inform them of what happened Friday afternoon into Saturday morning. We informed them of the situation and what we were doing to clean it up around the landfill area.
The litter on the highway is a separate issue not related to this weekends event. The customers that drive to our facility whether that be business or residents need to a do better job of securing their loads so that the roads aren’t littered. Our employees work and live in this community and litter is the last thing any of us want to see or deal with everyone needs to work together to keep the community looking nice. We have put even more measures into place at our facility up to and including closing down for the day if the winds are going to be an issue."