Tuesday evening, May 26, before the Amarillo City Council meeting, Carrie Homer shared her experiences with the Amarillo Globe-News about living near the Amarillo landfill.
She spoke later at the council meeting as well, during a much longer round of public comments.
Homer said her husband had lived out in the area around Bishop Estates since 1987, and she had lived there the last five years.
“We run cattle on the 600 acres south of the landfill,” she said. “The first year I lived there, it (the trash) was tolerable, you know, 50 or 60 bags of trash. It was no problem to pick them up yourself,” she said.
But, she said that progressively over the years, it’s gotten disgusting beyond control — the bags that have flown over.
“Our property is just covered and is disgusting,” she said. “I have called (the city) over the last year … I quit counting at 100 calls, and now I call Victoria, who works there,” Homer said.
During public comments, many such stories and complaints filled the air for around two hours. The mayor allowed residents to air their grievances beyond the normal allotted time, requesting multiple times that the timer be turned off so people could speak.
Several people commented on the trash getting out of hand and not being responded to, along with impassioned landowners wanting to know what they were supposed to do after being uprooted from homes that had built and lived in for 30 years or more.
Homer said she met a woman at the fence line about five months ago who was picking up trash. She said she asked the woman about all of the trash, and the woman said, “I can’t cross fence lines without permission.”
She said that she told the woman that she had her permission, and the woman said, “No, you’ll have to call Victoria, my supervisor.” Homer said that she has called her over a hundred times. Homer said she had her cell number, so she started calling her at different times of the day, leaving her message after message.
Homer said the smell of it is disgusting as well. “I grew up around feedlots,” she said. “But that’s different — it’s pleasant compared to what this smell has been. But it’s been worse the last six months and it’s not just trash — more like soured trash.”
It was also brought up at the meeting that if cattle or horses ingest a plastic bag, it can kill them.
“When they get the southwest winds, it’s unbearable,” she said.
Homer said she saw the fire Sunday, May 17, “and nobody was out there and I left for church at 10 a.m., that morning.”
She said that she got home at 1 p.m., “and you could see the smoke and it was bigger then.”
Homer said she took pictures of it, and there wasn’t anyone out there that they could see. “We would drive — down and around,” she said. Then they said some fire trucks came by and looked, but they weren’t there working.
“We were told that they were asked to stand back … and wait,” she said.
Homer said that they were forced to watch it get bigger and bigger and were told not to worry and that it was under control. “But it started to spread,” she said. Homer said that she didn’t see them spraying water until Monday. “We had no updates overnight, for over 18 to 20 hours, with no updates.”
“On Monday, I was helping my neighbor about 3:30 p.m., because her husband works out of town and she has three little ones. I told her that she might need to get prepared and get what she needed, just in case they needed to go,” Homer said. “Then, all of the sudden — smoke just came rolling over us, and I’m like, you have to get out now.”
Homer said she needed to get out then, “but still no fire trucks, there were no knocks on the doors where we were. They (firetrucks) could have been somewhere else, but we were in the lineup, and we didn’t know if the fire was coming to us or not.”
Homer said luckily the fire didn’t come directly to them, but it was 600 yards away. She said that people could expect some nastiness living close to a dump and that they would get a few trash bags, but it was “like totally uncontrollable,” showing a video of plastic bags swarming everywhere through the air.
“The neighborhood has text messages on Facebook back and forth from the mayor for the last two years, and Mr. Stanley corresponded with them that he would get the trash taken care of,” Homer said. “After several months of watching this, I started videoing it, but you can see it, even when it isn’t windy.”
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Problems with Amarillo landfill, trash spill over in public comments
Reporting by Nell Williams, Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
