InsideSources

While Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is in Washington D.C. this week, a landfill watchdog group is pushing for him to ask the Environmental Protection Agency for more funds to close several of the island’s overfilled landfills.

Puerto Rico Limpio, a landfill citizen’s action group in the territory, sent a letter, obtained by InsideSources, to the governor asking him to take action in stopping the illegal dumping and expansion of the Toa Baja landfill.

“The situation at the Toa Baja municipal landfill underlines the urgency of this matter,” wrote Hiram Torres Montalvo, cofounder of Puerto Rico Limpio, in the letter. “Widespread dumping and the illegal expansion of the landfill continues, exposing residents to toxic fumes, contaminated waters, and illicit gas that poses an imminent danger of explosion and fire.  This has made the neighborhood of Candelaria unsafe, and uninhabitable for its residents.”

In 2008, the EPA determined that the Toa Baja landfill placed “an imminent and substantial endangerment to health and the environment” and ordered the landfill to stop accepting waste at the main part by June 2010, with plans to close it completely to follow that order. InsideSources went to Puerto Rico in October to report on the crisis firsthand and saw how the Toa Baja landfill was impacting the neighborhood next to it. However, the landfill was still open and trucks were driving in to dump more waste at the site.

A view of the Toa Baja landfill from the Candelaria neighborhood, just outside of San Juan, P.R. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz)

Puerto Rico’s landfill crisis has been unchecked for the past 20 years. The EPA granted local authority of the 29 active landfills on the island to the Environmental Quality Board.

However, Puerto Rico Limpio published a bombshell report in August that said 19 out of the 29 active landfills in Puerto Rico are non-compliant with federal rules and the EPA has been ignoring these problems, despite several internal reports suggesting EPA inspectors knew about it.

To this day, many of the landfills are over capacity and are not following EPA regulations, such as placing a plastic lining between the garbage and the soil, covering the waste each night, and properly maintaining and removing dirty water lakes from trash runoff, which could end up in nearby neighborhood wells for drinking water.

The EPA announced last year that they would close the Cayey and Arroyo landfills in Puerto Rico within two to three years, but activists said the EPA is just making false promises again since several other landfills were supposed to close, but are still operating today, like the Toa Baja landfill.

Torres Montalvo is hopeful that the EPA, under new direction from administrator Scott Pruitt, will make the landfill crisis a priority and is calling on Rosselló to make it happen.

“Governor, you have the opportunity to change this. You ran for and have governed to date on ensuring Puerto Ricans are not treated as second-class citizens.  You have the power to close the landfill.  You have the authority to ask the EPA for immediate financial and technical assistance,” the letter states.

Rosselló and Federal Oversight Board Chairman Jose Carrion III are in the nation’s capital to testify before Congress on the progress the Commonwealth has made since former President Barack Obama signed The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) into law last year.

A report from the Congressional Task Force on Economic Growth in Puerto Rico released in December found that most of Puerto Rico’s landfills are in violation of EPA’s regulations governing solid waste management.

Yet, in a November letter to Puerto Rico Limpio, former EPA Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck painted a rosier picture of the federal agency’s handling of the landfill crisis. She pointed to progress being made with 10 landfills operating with fully-lined disposal cells and even 15 sites implementing a mosquito control plan. The landfills became a breeding ground for mosquitoes during the height of the Zika virus emergency on the island.

“The EPA continues to investigate the landfills on the island, and where necessary, will take legal action,” Enck wrote in the letter. “Thus, the agency has acted and will continue to act to protect public health and the environment from adverse impacts from the municipal solid waste landfills in Puerto Rico.”

It remains unclear exactly how, or even if, Pruitt plans to do anything about the Puerto Rico landfill crisis. The former Oklahoma attorney general has been blasted by the media for being a climate change denier and ally of the oil, gas, and coal industries. He has also called for an “aggressive” regulatory rollback within the agency, and it’s not immediately known how that would impact Puerto Rico.

The only question Pruitt received about Puerto Rico’s non-compliant landfills during his confirmation hearing came from U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

“If confirmed, I expect to make cleanup of contaminated land one of my priorities,” he responded. “I also believe in the importance of hearing the views of all stakeholders and would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further.”

Torres Montalvo applauded his remarks and said they “are a promising departure from the Obama EPA that turned a blind-eye to the illegal landfills operating in Puerto Rico.”

It’s unlikely Rosselló will head back to the island territory with any promises of more funding for the landfill crisis. President Donald Trump’s budget blueprint calls for a 31 percent spending reduction for the EPA, slashing its budget by $2.6 billion.

Also, the Commonwealth is currently working on a plan to pay back it’s more than $70 billion debt. Puerto Rico’s financial oversight board approved last week the governor’s plan, which calls for austerity measures and significant cuts in public spending.

Torres Montalvo said in the letter to Rosselló that he should pay close attention to the ongoing landfill crisis.

“The people of Candelaria, like in many affected communities, are begging us for help every day,” he wrote. “As citizens of the United States, no Puerto Rican should be subjected to and forced to live in these conditions, especially when the law expressly forbids it. It is time to uphold the rule of law, and close these illegal landfills.”

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In an interview with a local Puerto Rican media outlet, the president of the Environmental Quality Board (EQB) made a shocking admission about the landfill crisis in the U.S. territory.

Weldin Ortiz Franco acknowledged that they have eight to 10 inspectors, who are not exclusively dedicated to landfill inspections and sometimes fail to inspect all the landfills on the island.

“We try to see them [in] quarterly fiscal years but there are many that we cannot do it,” he told The Spokesman in Spanish. To have more employees, he said, “we could have more comprehensive work plans and a system of more frequent inspections.”

The EQB in Puerto Rico has local authority over the 27 active landfills on the island. They received that power in 1994 when they submitted a proposal detailing how they would follow federal rules and regulations when in charge of the landfills.

However, a citizen’s action group called Puerto Rico Limpio (or Clean Puerto Rico), alleges that the local EQB has illegally changed some its original rules for landfills and didn’t get approval from the Environmental Protection Agency to do so.

The group also claims that 19 of the 27 landfills in Puerto Rico are non-compliant, and for years, the EPA has ignored these problems, despite several internal reports suggesting they should act.

The relationship of the EPA and EQB is a unique and tricky one. Once the EPA has granted local authority to the EQB, they are technically no longer in charge of the landfills.

“EQB has primary responsibility for regulating solid waste landfills in the Commonwealth, and federal landfill criteria governing solid waste are not directly enforceable by EPA in Puerto Rico. Only EQB has permitting and solid waste enforcement authority over the landfills,” said John Martin, a spokesman for the EPA, in a statement to InsideSources.

However, the statement Martin provided was the same exact language the EPA used in its September 2016 Fact Sheet, titled “EPA’s Work To Address Puerto Rico’s Landfills.”

But the EPA will step in and enforce federal laws if there are serious environmental and health risks under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Section 7003 Imminent and Substantial Endangerment Authority. They used that to send consent orders to nine open dumps — multi-family dumpsite of any size or content, which is illegal under RCRA — in Puerto Rico, according to a June letter from the EPA Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck on behalf of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy to Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla.

Puerto Rico Limpio says the EPA is not doing enough to deal with the environmental and health problems in the territory.

“Weldin Ortiz confirmed what Puerto Rico Limpio has been saying from the start: the non-compliant landfills are toxic and should be shut down immediately,” said Hiram Torres Montalvo, cofounder of Puerto Rico Limpio, in a statement. “The failure to shut down these landfills rests solely with [EPA Region 2 Administrator] Judith Enck and the EQB, and attempts to abdicate responsibility by claiming there’s no money is a politically expedient attempt to shift attention away from their massive failure to protect the public’s health.”

Torres Montalvo also points out that Ortiz Franco says there is not enough staff in his office to carry out closures and perform inspections, but the EQB has essentially cut their entire staff.

According to EPA documents obtained by the citizen’s action group, in a 2014 assessment, the EPA found that the “EQB has eliminated or left open all central solid waste compliance and permitting staff positions.”

In 2000, they employed 14 central solid waste compliance and permitting staff, and by 2005, it had been reduced to five employees. In 2010, staffing was reduced to one, and by 2012, there were no central solid waste compliance and permitting staff.

In the June letter, the EPA recognized that the current financial crisis in Puerto Rico could have an impact on EQB staffing.

“This problem is compounded by the dwindling resources made available to the Puerto Rico Environmental Quality Board by the central government to carry out their solid waste compliance and enforcement program, a situation that we understand predated the current fiscal crisis facing the Commonwealth,” Enck wrote. “This has resulted in, among other things, reduced staffing and reported delays in permitting of new and existing landfills.”

While, the EQB sends staff to inspect the landfills, the EPA will occasionally send its own inspectors to file “fact sheets” about the current state of the landfills for internal use.

Martin, the EPA spokesman, did not expand on how many times the EPA sends its own inspectors to Puerto Rico’s landfills and did not answer a question about whether the EPA receives any of the reports from EQB inspectors, who according to EQB president Ortiz Franco, are not able to inspect all of the landfills.

“The document you cite was an internal EPA briefing document,” he said. “The EPA conducts inspections of landfills in Puerto Rico, but does not conduct annual ‘general assessment’ reports.”

Also in The Spokesman article, Ortiz Franco calls upon Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., to advocate for more federal funding to help close some non-federally compliant landfills.

“We have the staff, we have the expertise, the obligation to do so and regulatory law. That [Gutierrez] helps us to have a Congressional funding level to fund landfill projects that approach the Board so that we can put up with the needs of the Board and collaboration with federal funds to hire more people and have a more agile process control at the facilities,” Ortiz Franco said.

Congress just passed in June the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known as PROMESA, which aims to tackle the island’s billions of dollars of debt.

Gutierrez, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, isn’t Puerto Rico’s Congressman. Although he has an affinity for the island since he used to live there, there’s only so much he can do. He went to Puerto Rico recently to see the landfill crisis up close and how it is impacting residents who live in the neighborhoods around landfills.

SAN JUAN, P.R. — Imagine the smell of rotting eggs, mold, wet dog and spoiled cheese all mixed together. And that’s on a good day when the wind isn’t blowing hard and it’s not too hot. This is the smell that many Puerto Rican residents have to deal with on a daily basis when they live next to a landfill.

Take Conncetta Calise, a 59-year-old resident near the Toa Alta landfill, just outside of San Juan. Driving up to her house, there are several abandoned houses, that leave the feel the former residents just picked up and left abruptly. There’s another house before Calise’s that has a “for sale” sign up, which has apparently been there for over a year now. But who would want to buy a house next to a landfill?

“This is hell,” Calise said. “This is no way to sleep.”

Calise says she’s been fighting with the government for years now to close that landfill or even simply to address her concerns.

Conncetta Calise (right), 59, of Toa Alta , chatting with Puerto Rico Limpio cofounder Hiram Torres Montalvo. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

“There’s too much corruption,” she said. “They don’t care about the people or land.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is technically in charge of all 27 landfills in Puerto Rico. But an advocacy group claims that 19 of the territory’s landfills, including Toa Alta, are non-compliant according to federal regulations, and the EPA has ignored these warning signs for years.

Calise lives on the same property that her grandfather owned, way before the landfill was put there in 1970.

“I love this place,” she said. “There was water coming out of the ground before. There was no road and it was beautiful.”

But now the landfill dominates the landscape, creating a pungent odor in the area and a leachate lake of trash seepage right next to it. Calise said the runoff is contaminating her drinking water.

“I will keep fighting until my last breath because this is contaminating the water we drink,” she said. “I have to buy distilled water.”

But that’s not the worst of it. The trash lake near her house creates the perfect breeding conditions for mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus.

The Centers for Disease Control diagnosed about 16,000 Puerto Ricans with Zika, including at least 1,000 pregnant women. For expecting mothers, the concern with Zika is that their babies could be born with the birth defect microcephaly, which causes infants to be born with shrunken heads and other health issues.

“I had Zika for two months because they are so bad here. I don’t have the defense for it, and I also have lupus,” she said. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) attended a community meeting last week at the home of a Puerto Rican resident who lives right next to the Toa Baja landfill, only about 15 minutes away from Toa Alta.

Adelaida Gonzalez has lived in Toa Baja for 44 years, but the landfill has only been there since 1972. She, like Calise, tried to express her concerns to authorities, but no one listened to her.

Adelaida Gonzalez (second from left) has lived in Toa Baja for 44 years. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

“The smell of the landfill was really unbearable for over a year,” she said in Spanish. “We do not know what to do.”

Gutierrez, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, came to the territory to see the crisis with his own eyes and how it’s affecting the people. After the community meeting, he went to another section of the Toa Baja landfill to see it up close and speak with some residents who live there.

At Yahaida Porratas’ home, she lives right next to where garbage trucks drive in and out of the landfill to dump trash each day. All that separates the landfill from her house is a fence — an unfinished fence actually.

The edge of the mountain to the unfinished fence is a space big enough for a human to walk through and animals to pass each day.

Yahaida Porratas (left), 40, of Toa Baja, is telling Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) about her living conditions next to the landfill. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

“There are a lot of rats,” she said. “One was so big, I thought it was a cat. I can’t have any food outside. We can’t live here. We can’t do anything.”

The 40-year-old woman has three kids — a 17-, 19- and 21-year-old — and she’s worried about their health.

“There are a lot of flies and mosquitoes all the time,” she said in Spanish. “I have fibromyalgia and high blood pressure. My kids have a rash and the doctors say it’s because of where we live.”

The smell was significantly stronger than at Gonzalez’s house since Porratas lives closer to the top of the trash mound.

“My kids never want to be here,” she said. “We never leave the windows open. It’s not fair. I’ve been here since 1976 and it gets worse and worse each year.”

SAN JUAN, P.R. – When Rep. Luis Gutierrez pulled up to a house in the Candelaria neighborhood of the Toa Baja municipality in Puerto Rico, you wouldn’t have recognized him as a congressman. He was wearing a light pink, short-sleeved button-up shirt with black dress pants, loafers — not his typical suit attire he’s used to wearing in Washington D.C. with a pin identifying him as a member of Congress.

But Gutierrez is not the representative for Puerto Rico. He’s a Democrat from Illinois’ 4th Congressional District in Chicago, which has a significant Puerto Rican and Mexican constituency. Gutierrez is of Puerto Rican heritage and lived on the island during his high school years.

Gutierrez wasn’t campaigning when he went to the outskirts of San Juan, P.R. on Tuesday. He attended a community meeting with Toa Baja residents and environmental group advocates to discuss the landfill crisis and to see how it’s impacting people with his own eyes.

“It’s not unusual to have a congressman at a community hearing,” said Mark Magaña, president and CEO of GreenLatinos, a Latino environmental and conservation group, during the meeting. “He’s spent his whole career fighting for people and he’s a proud Puerto Rican. He is known as someone who will get dirty, get arrested, and speak to the president as he would you or I. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he’s here.”

He mostly sat in a plastic chair during the meeting, listening intently to the 20 residents and activists list the ongoing problems with the landfills and asking questions occasionally to better understand the situation.

“This is my island and one day, I want to come back here,” he told reporters in Spanish after the meeting. “But there needs to be a place to come back to. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was going on here and to tell the people they are not alone. I care that the people here don’t have the same quality of life as the people in Chicago. That’s not right.”

The municipalities and companies that run these landfills are not properly maintaining the site and have broken several federal regulations put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to residents and environmental activist groups.

A view of the Toa Baja landfill from the Candelaria neighborhood, just outside of San Juan, P.R. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz)

Puerto Rico Limpio, a citizen’s action group for safe trash disposal, published a scathing report in August that said 19 out of the 27 active landfills in Puerto Rico are non-compliant with federal rules and the EPA has ignored these problems.

In 1994, the EPA gave Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board local control over the landfills. Then, without EPA approval, the EQB changed some of its rules and regulations to make it easier and more profitable to dump trash at the landfills.

When the EPA found out about it in 2005, they threatened to take control away from the EQB if they did not bring their landfills into compliance. To this day, many of the landfills are over capacity and are not following EPA rules, such as requiring a plastic lining between the garbage and the soil, covering the trash each night and properly maintaining leachate lakes — the dirty water runoff from the trash.

“The municipalities and landfills are located in low-income, rural and low-educated areas,” said Hiram Torres Montalvo, cofounder of Puerto Rico Limpio. “We exposed them and everyone can see that this landfill [Toa Baja] should be closed today. It’s time for [EPA Administrator] Gina McCarthy to end the dereliction of duty to the people of Puerto Rico.”

The EPA announced last week that they would close the Cayey and Arroyo landfills in Puerto Rico within two to three years. Torres Montalvo said those closures aren’t enough and the EPA is just making false promises again. Several other landfills were supposed to have closed in previous years, but they remain operational today.

Adelaida Gonzalez lives in the home where the meeting took place. She said she lived there for 44 years and the landfill has been there for 30 years. When they started to build it, she voiced her concerns to authorities, but no one seemed to listen.

“The smell of the landfill was really unbearable for over a year,” she said in Spanish. “It is almost impossible for us to live here. Mosquitoes at night are alarming due to the Zika virus. We do not know what to do. Some of the people here have cancer and it’s not helping.”

How the landfills are affecting people’s health is one of the greatest concerns of environmental advocates. There has been virtually no testing on air quality or water contamination from seepage leaking into communities drinking water supply, the group alleges.

Dogs were able to pass by the unfinished fence near the Toa Baja landfill and were playing in the trash. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

After the meeting, Gutierrez went to the fence to see the landfill up close. There were trucks bringing in more garbage to dump and other trucks were moving the trash around. A small leachate lake, of dirty trash water, was visible near the fence and could create the perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes and the Zika virus.

The Centers for Disease Control diagnosed about 16,000 Puerto Ricans with Zika, including at least 1,000 pregnant women. For expecting mothers, the concern with Zika is that their babies could be born with the birth defect microcephaly, which causes infants to be born with shrunken heads and other health issues.

As many as a quarter of Puerto Ricans may contract the Zika virus, which has spread at alarming rates.

An unfinished fence near a resident’s home in Toa Baja. The landfill is right next to their house and the space between the fence and the natural mountain is big enough for people, dogs, and other animals to pass through. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

Gutierrez also went to another side of the Toa Baja landfill, where the fence stops right near a resident’s home. There is enough space between the end of the fence and the start of the mountain that people and animals can easily fit through it.

Trucks were passing by, dogs were playing in the trash and sewage water and the smell was significantly worse.

Gutierrez said the federal government should take back responsibility of the crisis.

“The government is failing the people of Candelaria,” he said. “If you had to live next to this landfill, is the government really protecting them? I would have to say no. We have to tell the federal government to assume its responsibility to them.”

Congress recently approved $1.1 billion in federal funding to fight the Zika virus. It’s unclear how they will spend it and how much Puerto Rico will receive to stop their outbreak.

And Congress also just passed in June the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known as PROMESA (promise in Spanish), which aims to tackle the island’s billions of dollars of debt.

But Gutierrez has been very outspoken about his disapproval of PROMESA, saying the appointment of a fiscal control board could lead to another Flint, Mich. water crisis.

“You can see the manipulation. It’s a pretty word, but if they aren’t going to take responsibility of it, then what’s the point?,” he said. “When I make a promise, it’s for something good, not bad. You should have the same standards as they do in Chicago. It just doesn’t make sense.”

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