Ribbon cutting marks landmark landfill closure

Crazy Horse Landfill project in Monterey County, Calif.

A late June ribbon-cutting ceremony was conducted at the Crazy Horse Landfill (CHLF) to celebrate final closure of the historic facility located just north of Salinas, Calif.

The completion of this closure project will now allow the creation of a solar farm on the existing 66-acre landfill site within the total project footprint of 160 acres adjacent to Crazy Horse Canyon Road. The entire parcel is owned by the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority (SVSWA).

The CHLF began waste activity in 1934 as a burn dump and continued in that operation method until 1966. Converted to a sanitary landfill, it continued waste operations until about 1972, with initial dump areas closed in 1988, and a portion of the landfill became a Superfund site in 1990. The CHLF stopped accepting waste in 2009, when closure proceedings moved forward.

The CHLF closure project—from finished grading to installation of the top layer ClosureTurf system, including the construction management and construction quality assurance (CQA) costs—was completed for approximately $10.5 million.

—Ron Bygness, Geosynthetics magazine

Source: Agru America Inc. and SVSWA