THE DALLES — The trucks would come six days a week, 24 hours a day, from July to October. Roughly 120 of them per day, climbing a steep two-lane grade and grinding their way from the Columbia River to the Wasco County Landfill with a load Portland wants desperately to shed: 3 million cubic yards of carcinogen-laden mud from the bottom of the Willamette River.
That potential vision, laid out at a Sept. 10 meeting of the Portland Harbor Collaborative, has rattled Wasco County residents who say they already face daily danger sharing the road with landfill-bound traffic.
An investigation last year by Columbia Gorge News found that the Wasco County Landfill, owned by Texas-based Waste Connections, has quadrupled its intake of waste from Portland over the past 10 years, drastically increasing the volume of heavy long-distance traffic navigating the road’s tight curves and blind corners.
“This is a dangerous road. We all know it,” said Commissioner Phil Brady, who brought slides and photographs to the meeting to illustrate what locals call the “bad turn” where trucks turning from Five Mile Road meet oncoming traffic at highway speeds.
“It is already the Road From Hell and adding 15,300 more truck loads per year carrying Portland's toxic wastes will make it that much more dangerous,” said former PUD director Linda Wilson, a resident of Five Mile.
Wilson and several other Five Mile residents attended the Portland Harbor Collaborative’s meeting to voice their concerns about the landfill road. Other attendees brought questions about the safe transportation of the dredged material containing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which are known to be carcinogenic.
Mary Peveto, co-director of Portland-based environmental organization Neighbors for Clean Air, reached out to Columbia Gorge News with information about the superfund cleanup after learning about the truck traffic dangers near the landfill.
“Who's talking about the human health risk for the community that lives above that cleanup site… and then the community where this stuff is being dumped, that's going to get all these truck trips out there?” she said in a conversation with Columbia Gorge News.
“We haven’t had a disastrous collision here yet,” Brady said at the Sept. 10 meeting, “but it’s based on two things: everybody driving with optimal alertness, and just plain luck.”
Portland’s pollution, Wasco’s worry
The waste in question comes from the Portland Harbor Superfund site, a 10-mile stretch of the Willamette River that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated one of the nation’s most contaminated waterways in 2000.
For more than a century, industries along the riverbed discharged PCBs, heavy metals and dioxins into the sediment.
The cleanup plan, finalized in 2017, calls for dredging heavily contaminated mud and capping other areas with clean material.
EPA estimates the job will generate 5 million tons of material, 93% of it classified as “non-hazardous” but still requiring disposal in lined Subtitle D landfills. The remaining 7%, deemed hazardous, must go to a Subtitle C hazardous waste cell at the Chemical Waste Management facility near Arlington, Oregon.
Transportation and disposal represent two-thirds of the project’s total cost, according to EPA project manager Caleb Schaffer.
“It’s the most expensive part of the cleanup,” he told the collaborative. “And it’s also the most logistically challenging.”
A long climb
The Wasco County Landfill sits eight miles south of The Dalles, most frequently accessed by Highway 197 and Five Mile Road which locals say is already strained by existing truck traffic.
Commissioner Brady, a former physics teacher, brought maps and calculations to make his case.
“First you have to climb 600 feet in one mile. Do the math, that’s a 10% grade,” he said. “Once you get up to the top, then you go down another 10% grade down into Five Mile Creek, … then you climb up the road to get to the landfill.”
The most dangerous point, he said, is the intersection where Five Mile Road meets Highway 197. Trucks leaving the landfill must stop and then turn onto a highway where cars travel 50 miles an hour.
“From the driver’s seat, you’ve got maybe 15 seconds to see a car coming and get that truck moving,” Brady said.
“This will be happening less than 45 feet from my front door,” said Cindy Keever who lives at the corner of Five Mile and HWY 197. Keever also attended the Sept.10 EPA meeting. “Does the safety of the driving public on Hwy 197 & Five Mile Road matter? How about the people living along and using Five Mile daily. Or, what about the children riding the school buses?”
EPA considering several landfills
Under the PHC’s 2017 cleanup plan, disposal is limited to four regional landfills: Wasco County Landfill near The Dalles, Columbia Ridge Landfill and Chemical Waste Management in Arlington, and Roosevelt Regional Landfill across the Columbia River in Washington.
EPA staff laid out three main options for moving sediment out of Portland:
Trucking directly to a landfill.
Barging to the Port of Morrow and then trucking or railing to Arlington or Columbia Ridge.
Rail transport directly to landfills.
The collaborative’s modeling envisions up to 200,000 truckloads over 13 years: an average of 120 trucks a day during the four-month in-water dredging season.
Alternatives include barging sediment to the Port of Morrow for transfer to rail, or directly to Columbia Ridge. Each option comes with trade-offs in cost, air emissions and community impact.
Air quality models presented in the meeting packet estimated that long-haul trucking could generate up to 71,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the life of the project.
Rail generates fewer greenhouse gases but produces more particulate matter, due to weaker emissions controls on locomotives.
Barging is relatively efficient, but transload facilities create new chokepoints.
“All of these options are on the table,” Schaffer said. “Each project area will submit its own transportation and disposal plan. EPA will review them, but community input is critical.”
A community caught in the middle
Commissioner Brady emphasized that his opposition is not to the cleanup itself.
“We all benefit from cleaning up the Willamette,” he said. “The salmon runs on the Columbia, the Deschutes, the Klickitat—they matter to us too.”
But he insisted that Portland’s toxic legacy should not come at Wasco County’s expense.
“We're really worried that this is a place where bad things could happen, especially superintendent Jack Anderson is worried about kids on his buses,” he said.
Attendees at the meeting asked why EPA could not build new facilities closer to Portland. One individual suggested thermal treatment technologies that could destroy PCBs rather than bury them.
EPA officials responded that such research is not feasible on the cleanup’s timeline.
“The public is eager to see this cleanup begin,” Schaffer said. “A major new research project probably is not something that we would be able to entertain and wait for if it's not a proven technology.”
Final decision still pending
EPA hopes to finalize a consent decree with responsible parties by 2027, with dredging possibly beginning the following summer. That timeline leaves Wasco County leaders and residents with time to share any thoughts or concerns.
“We would like to redesign the road,” Brady said, “but that's a long range dream.”
For now, the Portland Harbor Collaborative will continue to weigh its options. But in The Dalles, the fear is simple: that Portland’s century of pollution could end with over a decade of trucks on Auction Yard Hill.
For an overview on the Portland Harbor Superfund Site, visit the Portland Harbor website.
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