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Piston Pumping Solutions - Landfill Vault
The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, Ill., (FPDDC) has
solved a stormwater runoff problem that plagued the Blackwell Forest
Preserve last year. The overflow was the result of a problem with the
closure techniques used on the Mount Hoy landfill, which ceased operations
in 1973 and later was designated a Superfund site.
The Mount Hoy landfill is located in the preserve, which is a 1,312-acre area that includes several lakes, fishing and boating facilities,
hiking trails and shelters. Because the landfill was named a Superfund
site, FPDDC had to construct a leachate and gas management
system. In addition, the district had to recontour the top of the landfill
to minimize water infiltration by creating a barrier using clay and topsoil. As a result of the revised landscape, Mount Hoy became a recreational
area during the winter as locals and visitors used it as a tubing hill.
Nine pumps were installed to move leachate from the landfill to a centrally located 10,000-gallon capacity tank. The contents
of the tank are then trucked to a water treatment facility for processing.
Jerry Hartwig, project manager for the Forest Preserve, and Site Engineer Ray Babowice manage the groundwater monitoring
wells around the site to ensure there is no contamination in the area. Last year they discovered that stormwater —
which could not permeate the clay barrier — was working into the dirt surface at the bottom of the hill. The water eventually
traveled to a parking lot adjacent to Mount Hoy, which forced visitors to trudge through a muddy and wet area.
To solve the problem, the district built a stormwater collection system consisting of a 30-foot-long trench lined with PVC
piping and filled with gravel. After the stormwater is collected, it is pumped into the leachate collection system. Because
the water was being pumped only five feet below the bottom of the well that collected it, the district decided that a discrete
vault would provide the best type of pump installation and would blend in with the surrounding recreational environment.
“There is no electricity out on the hill and we don’t want any electric wires there, which would destroy the beauty and functionality
of the hill,” Hartwig says. “Instead, we use a compressor with a dryer to supply air to the pumps, which prevents
the lines from fouling up and from freezing over the winter.”
Hartwig used a pneumatic Trident pump designed for vault applications from Glen Ellyn, Ill.-based Blackhawk Environmental
to continually pump the stormwater into the collection tank. “We installed a single cover over the entire 4-foot vault
so that the pump does not show,” Hartwig says.
Today, the landfill remains environmentally secure and its conversion into a recreational area has been completed. “The
combination of the trenching system, discrete vault and short pneumatic pump have solved our stormwater problems on
our landfill-turned-winter-tubing-hill,” Hartwig adds.
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