Coping with Corona: What’s in Mt. Trashmore?

PLAINS TWP. — It was sometime in the 1980s and I decided to take a walk through my old neighborhood just to see what was still there just to reminisce.

As I walked up Reynolds Street, past Walter Roman’s old house and the Banash house and the Dopko, Haas, Borsavage, Kunigonis, Muchler, Balita, Maslowski, Piontek and Rydzefski houses, I stopped at the Miklosi house to speak with Mr. Miklosi.

Now first let me tell you that my friend, Steve Miklosi, and his sisters, Catherine and Elaine, were the first to have a color TV on our street — a beautiful Zenith that amazed us when we were invited to watch Bonanza one night. They also had an above-ground pool, which we got to swim in when Steve completed all his household chores.

And Mr. Miklosi always had a new Chevrolet Impala that he kept spotless.

Anyway, as I was talking to Mr. Miklosi, I noticed a bulldozer atop a high hill that was never there when I was growing up. Mr. Miklosi told me the bulldozer was pushing garbage in the West Side Landfill.

Upon further review, I learned the landfill had moved to this 220-plus-acre site and had a wonderful plan to bring the latest technology to garbage disposal — a baler would compact the garbage into tidy squares that would be placed in neat piles. This process would extend the life of the landfill for decades and life would be grand with people dancing in the streets.

That never happened. What did happen was a 24-hour-a-day parade of tractor-trailers filled with who knows what from who knows where. Residents were beyond upset — they were scared.

And to make matters worse, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (the predecessor to DEP) issued only one permit for a small section of the site. Because the landfill authority could not get any other part of the site permitted, the garbage was piled splendiferously into what became known as Mount Trashmore.

So, what began as a state-of-the-art fairy tale had now become a state-of-uncertainty/potential nightmare.

The West Side Landfill has been closed for years and what’s left of it sits in neglected splendor between Keating Street in Larksville and my old neighborhood in Plymouth.

Mount Trashmore is still there, covered now with grass, weeds and trees. Some areas, I’m told, are exposed. I’m not sure if anybody really knows what is percolating in Mount Trashmore.

In the 1980s, the landfill really stunk. There was a leachate (garbage soup) pond that was a color I have never seen before — not even in the extra big box of Crayola crayons. There was concern back then that the leachate may have seeped into the ground water.

I’m not aware of any evidence of that, but perhaps we won’t know until the neighborhood dogs get a lot meaner or somebody grows tomatoes the size of watermelons.

The question remaining to this day is should we be concerned about the landfill and its future?

I’m told the West Side Landfill Authority no longer exists as an authority pursuant to the Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities Act.

But the mountain remains and we still don’t really know what the heck was buried there.

So far, so good — I guess.