Biscayne Landing, 193-acre master-planned community, is one of the largest residential projects in the State of Florida. It is built on the former site of Munisport Landfill, which has been approved by all of the appropriate regulatory bodies.
2007-07-09 06:16:37 · 2 answers · asked by Anonymous in Environment ➔ Other - Environment
To find out what kind of materials may have been released into the groundwater, you would have to do a records review of the former landfill itself.
Check the monitoring well records and review the closure of the landfill.
Historically, some landfills will continue to emit methane and other gases. There are rare documented cases where fires have erupted in former restored landfills.
As far as adverse health effects, you could do a search engine review and see what is out there.
The answer will lie in what materials were collected in the landfill itself. If there were no hazardous materials (there will always be some), then your risk would be less.
My experience with landfills is that they will take hundreds of years to decompose the materials.
2007-07-10 02:03:04 · answer #1 · answered by Christmas Light Guy 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
About.com has an extensive web-page on Biscayne Landing(Ref 1). One source cited, the EPA fact-sheet on site reuse, has only a few sentences about the site's past contamination:
"The site’s reuse was also facilitated by close coordination between area governments and EPA, resulting in a phased remedy for the site, enabling portions of the site to be rapidly returned to use. EPA also transferred regulatory authority for the site to Miami-Dade County and deleted the site from the NPL in 1999. The site’s remedy includes ground water remediation, landfill closure and capping, and wetland restoration." (Ref 2)
The Answers.com web-page on the Munisport Landfill (http://www.answers.com/topic/munisport) comes from Wikipedia's web-page and states:
"Although Munisport was found to contain very large quantities of extremely toxic chemicals, and documented to have received hospital biohazard waste and drums of toxic chemicals during its operation, heavy political pressure brought on by wealthy developers eventually led to the site being removed from the Superfund list without any of the well documented necessary cleanup. In 2005, this uncleaned former Superfund dump was chosen to be a site for a high-cost condo development. The current developer is under no legal obligation to divulge the toxic nature of this property to future residents."
Unfortunately, all the references cited by the Wikipedia web-page are dated between 1985 and 1998. The website claims that non-permitted dumping occurred at the landfill (very likely true) and that residents of Highland Village, adjacent to the landfill, have claimed ill-effects including "inordinately high number of cancers in their neighborhood after dumping began" (such claims are very hard to prove). It should be noted that Wikipedia entries are not subject to scientific peer review.
The developer of Biscayne Landing also fails to inspire confidence because it provides no documentation what-so-ever. Part of the website is "The Environmental Story" (Ref 3), but it's nothing more that a "feel-good story". It states that " Boca Developers has successfully coordinated with the Environmental Protection Agency a $30 million clean-up process to restore the land to its natural state. " I say *Big Deal*!
The Florida DEP summary (Ref 4) for the site notes that EPA delisted Munisport Landfill as a Superfund Site in 1999. Apparently, the landfill was closed and capped, leachate was treated, and remediation efforts were aimed at hydrologically isolating the landfill. But the remediation efforts didn't remove or treat toxic materials in the land fill - all it tried to do was isolate them from people and the environment. Unfortunately, there can be no guarantee that bad chemicals dumped in the landfill over its life won't come back to haunt the future residents of Biscayne Landing.
2007-07-10 09:04:13 · answer #2 · answered by Observer in MD 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋