Records show Pre's Trail landfill can leak contaminants during rain

Newly obtained records and photographs released through the Environmental Protection Agency under the Freedom of Information Act show waterlogged conditions at the 70 acre Day Island Landfill beneath Pre's Trail, and describe instances where contaminated water has broken through the surface and may be seeping toward a pond near the Willamette River. The documents, stored for years in Washington, D.C. archives, detail standing pools, oily sheens and orange or reddish brown clay in water that archival reviewers characterized as likely leachate from buried waste.

The records identify an area of roughly 200 square feet used to accept chemical waste from J.H. Baxter & Co., the former wood treatment company in west Eugene whose facility is now a Superfund cleanup site. Investigative reporting by Lookout Eugene Springfield drew those archival materials into public view on the question of monitoring at one of Eugene's most heavily used recreation corridors.

Local stewardship groups are working in the area. On a recent volunteer restoration day a stewardship coordinator with the Walama Restoration Project described the challenges of planting on the site, where only about two feet of soil separate a decade or more of buried municipal waste from the surface. The shallow cap makes it difficult for deep rooted plants to establish and leaves new plantings exposed to full sun in summer and saturated ground in fall and winter.

Records and photographs note that the landfill cap does not include an impermeable liner, and that groundwater moves quickly through loose sandy soils and can become trapped beneath the cap, forcing seepage. Monitoring records from the early 1990s are sparse, and archival EPA evaluations from that era found some monitoring wells were poorly constructed and produced inconsistent data. The agency decided in 1993 not to list the site for federal Superfund designation after scoring below the threshold for that program, while acknowledging that the site does have environmental problems associated with it.

State and county agencies as well as the EPA either do not have monitoring records since the early 1990s or report they cannot locate them, and officials say they currently have no plans to resume systematic monitoring of the landfill site. That leaves questions about potential exposure for people who walk, run and recreate on Pre's Trail and in Alton Baker Park, and about the potential for contamination to migrate into the Willamette River system.

For Lane County residents the immediate issue is one of transparency and public safety. The archival revelations underscore the need for clear information about contaminants detected historically, the condition of monitoring infrastructure and any plans to test soils and surface waters now that the records are in public hands. Local environmental stewards and public interest reporters have provided new visibility to a complex problem that touches recreation, restoration work and regional water quality, and those threads will likely shape community conversation and agency response in the months ahead.