Scholl Canyon dump has risen over Eagle Rock for more than 50 years. Dump trucks deposit there each day tons of trash from Glendale, NOT from Los Angeles. Yet all the garbage enters via Eagle Rock. And the dump burdens air in Northeast L.A. with dangerous and deadly pollutants, from nitrogen oxides to fine and coarse particles that lodge in the lungs. The dump is finally due to close, in 2021.
Now Glendale has announced plans for a huge expansion. Strong community opposition--our voices--will be key to stopping it.
UPDATE 10/24/17
Some used to call it a "secret dump." But no more is Glendale's dirty trash pit just a budget line on the city's profit ledger, or the subject of insider banter among waste haulers.
Now, thanks to pressure from EAPD members and hundreds of residents, Glendale yielded to stern criticism about rushing forward without public review a scheme to build a Gas Plant at Scholl Dump. Last Friday, Oct. 20, the city, which is acting as lead agency on a proposal that serves its own intrastate while imposing pollution dangers and risks of degraded health and property values on nearby residents, granted 3 more weeks, until Nov. 9, for accepting comments on its proposal.
Glendale's massive dump at Scholl Canyon sits on more than 500 acres at the north end of Figueroa Street, in the southeast corner of Glendale, near the landmark Eagle Rock. It poisons the lungs and water table of nearby residents, and has done for 56 years, since it opened in 1961, before federal standards required a solid rock base beneath dumps.
You can read more about the dump and the Gas Plant scheme, and how some in Glendale government are trying to proceed with it in connection with changes at the Grayson power plant. At a time when Trump Administration attacks on the environment and scientists and advocates working to protect it are putting Americans' lives, jobs, investments, and values at grave peril, local vigilance to stop backward waste policies and fix broken decision-making is all the more vital.
UPDATE 11/5/15
Expanding Scholl Canyon dump threatens a garbage high-rise of 180 additional feet, or 17 stories tall, looming over its immediate neighbors. The massive dump enlargement will also impose “significant unavoidable adverse impacts related to air quality.” That’s not rhetoric; it’s the language of Glendale’s own environmental impact statement.
When it comes to pollution, the news only gets worse for Eagle Rock and Pasadena. As Glendale admits, “Public access is only from Scholl Canyon Road.” That leaves residents of the neighborhoods downwind from the dump entrance breathing diesel exhaust from hundreds of dump trucks entering the dump each day. Long-term exposure to that exhaust is dangerous and can be deadly. The Centers for Disease Control have declared diesel exhaust a carcinogen for more than a quarter century. The American Cancer Society has documented the many life-depleting risks to humans from exposure to diesel exhaust.
