PORT ANGELES — Dad pulled up, right up, to the brink. Any farther, and the car’s rear end would have tipped over the edge of the bluff toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
“It was pretty scary,” said Kathryn Neal, who was about 7 when her father would go out to the western end of 18th Street to dump trash.
But that’s what people did in those days: the 1950s and ’60s, when Port Angeles had what Neal calls “a true dump.”
They rolled dead cars over the bluff’s edge. They threw out piles upon piles of plastic, paper, glass, old ropes and fishing nets.
Back then, the bluff beyond the edge of town was “away.” Now, of course, people know there’s no such thing; our castoffs have a way of reappearing, someday and somewhere.
Today, there’s a gigantic mass of garbage on that Port Angeles bluff.
It’s been accumulating for decades, as the town dump became the landfill and, in 2007 when that was closed, became the city’s Transfer Station.
Neal, now the city engineering manager, is one of the officials charged with caring for it.
On June 17, 2011, Neal was inspecting the sea wall that had been built at the base of the bluff.
She looked up and saw bad news.
Garbage, eroded bluff
Garbage, stored in a giant hole inside the bluff, was visible. It showed through the bluff’s flank, in what would soon be known as the failure zone.
“We saw a little landslide,” coming down the 135-foot-high bluff, recalled Neal.
The erosion was happening in the landfill section known as East Cell 304, where the failure zone could lead to garbage falling into the Strait.
“Oh, my gosh,” was Neal’s reaction.
Back at City Hall, consternation reigned. Then, the process of discovery began.
400,000 cubic yards of trash
Neal and the city Department of Public Works found that nearly 400,000 cubic yards of trash — picture several thousand football fields piled high — would have to be moved away from the bluff’s edge.
The city needed extra-large excavators, haul trucks and compactors in what would be named the Landfill Cell Stabilization Project.
After three years of study, planning and design, the actual cleanup began this summer.
The city won a $3,999,100 grant from the state as requested by the state Department of Ecology, then secured $16,942,790 in bond funding for the effort.
Total bill
The total bill, Neal said, will reach $21.25 million.
It will take a quarter-century to pay it all off, she added.
Port Angeles and East Clallam County residents will, little by little, foot the bill with garbage rates plus surcharges at the Transfer Station.
In the coming five years, Port Angeles households will see their garbage bills rise 31.6 percent for weekly pickup and 30.1 percent for biweekly.
Fees to dump trash at the transfer station will rise about 5 percent per year for the next half-decade.
Scooping and hauling began in July as huge vehicles, with their 10-foot-by-10-foot buckets, rumbled in.
The city hired Magnus Pacific of Roseville, Calif., to move East Cell 304’s contents south about 1,200 feet to what’s called the 351 cell.
All day the wheels turn, as the trucks travel in a seemingly endless loop. Excavators scoop garbage from deep in the hole. Haul trucks carry it south, where it’s deposited at 351.
End of the month
The majority of the trash — 247,000 cubic yards — should be moved by the end of this month, Neal said.
Then work will halt for the rainy season Nov. 1, and a reinforced-plastic cover will be laid over East Cell 304.
That will come off next May, said Neal, and Magnus Pacific will scoop and shift the remaining 152,090 cubic yards away from the bluff’s edge.
The whole cleanup is scheduled for completion a little over a year from now.
As for the land itself, erosion will go on, Neal said. The city won’t try to stop it.
Bluff will go
“We’re not sure how quickly the bluff will go,” she said. “In 25 years, maybe it will be back 100 feet . . . or you could lose 50 feet in two minutes” in a strong rainstorm.
“We’ve been fortunate with our winters since 2011” and relatively mild rain- and snowfall.
As often happens, this project has challenged Neal in ways she didn’t plan on.
When she came to work at the city of Port Angeles in May 2007, the closure of the landfill was underway.
It was being turned into a place where trash stayed temporarily before being transported to destination landfills, first in Oregon and, for the past several years, in Roosevelt, Klickitat County.
“We really thought we were done. We were in post-closure mode,” merely maintaining the site, she said.
Then came the landslide, and “now we’re completely rearranging the place.”
Out at the transfer station, Public Works Inspector Jeremy Pozernick added that the cleanup vehicles, lumbering like dinosaurs on the blufftop, is some of the biggest gear on the Peninsula.
“A lot of people just slow down,” he said, “and watch these big toys moving around.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
