First lesson in draining 70 million gallons of garbage juice: It won’t be cheap.

April 12--The cost of a massive buildup of leachate in the regional landfill in Suffolk began to sink in today as board members of the Southeastern Public Service Authority authorized the first of what likely will be many millions of dollars to fix the problem.

In a special meeting, the authority board approved contracts totaling about $1.9 million to begin truck-hauling of the garbage juice away from the landfill.

It will be the first phase -- five months long -- in a process that could eventually require SPSA to build its own leachate-treatment facility, said Jeffrey Murray, a senior project manager for HDR Inc.

More than 70 million gallons of leachate have accumulated in the two active cells of the landfill, and 60,000 to 70,000 gallons more likely are being generated each day, Murray estimated.

Even after bumping up the removal rate from 50,000 gallons a day to 250,000 by adding the truck hauling, Murray said it will take at least a year to bring leachate levels back within state regulations.

About 30 feet of the garbage-tainted water had built up in some places. Virginia Department of Environmental Quality guidelines allow no more than a foot.

The leachate buildup was discovered in late January, but Murray said it likely began years ago. SPSA had had no reliable measurements of leachate for at least seven years. Leachate is a natural occurrence in landfills, but it's not clear why so much built up in this case -- or why SPSA and regulators weren't paying more attention.

"I think the management of the landfill was asleep at the switch," said board member Bill Sorrentino, a private engineer in Virginia Beach. He's been the most outspoken board member and is leading an effort to develop a set of critical indicators for SPSA staff and board members in the hopes of preventing another expensive surprise.

Last week at a Virginia Beach City Council work session, city manager Dave Hansen said he would have been fired by council members if he'd managed the leachate issue the way SPSA had dealt with it.

Virginia Beach is one of eight cities and counties that are part of SPSA, a public agency. The Beach accounts for nearly 40 percent of SPSA's budget, paying a per-ton tipping fee of $125 for garbage collected in the city.

SPSA currently sends almost all of the trash collected by its member localities to a Wheelabrator Technologies facility in Portsmouth, where it's burned to generate steam for the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and electricity that's sold onto the grid. Ash from the incinerator is then trucked to the landfill.

That contract ends in January, however, and SPSA has been planning to switch to a new company called RePower South, which has proposed a trash-processing facility in Chesapeake that would open toward the end of 2018. RePower has taken longer than expected to finalize its financing. It was supposed to have wrapped things nearly three months ago.

In the interim period next year before RePower was to come online, SPSA had been planning on using its landfill more intensively. That's one of the reasons why the agency is under pressure to fix the leachate problem.

So far, SPSA and its regulators have said that the buildup hasn't spilled beyond the liners of cells 5 and 6.

The SPSA board approved two contracts at its meeting today:

* $138,000 to Conley Environmental of Chesapeake to improve more than a mile of roadway inside the landfill to accommodate tanker trucks.

* Up to $1.8 million to Atlantic Heating & Cooling of Virginia Beach to haul 200,000 gallons of leachate a day over a five-month period beginning May 1 to four Hampton Roads Sanitation District treatment plants -- one each in Chesapeake and Portsmouth and two in Hampton. The rate works out to 6 cents per gallon. Roughly 30 truckloads a day are expected.

SPSA already is pumping 50,000 gallons a day through a sewer line to the sanitation district's Nansemond plant in northern Suffolk. Its permit won't allow it to pump more to that facility without reducing chemical concentrations in the leachate, however. Concentrations that are too high can damage or destroy the sanitation district's treatment process.

Murray said because the sanitation district is considering further tightening permit standards for industrial dischargers like SPSA, it may be worth it in the long run for the trash authority to do more treatment of leachate in-house.

The investment cost for that could range from as little as $500,000 to as much as $4 million, he said.

Murray said an evaluation of long-term options will be ready by year's end. Not soon enough, Sorrentino told fellow SPSA board members.

"I'd like to cut this time in half," he said.

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