California landfill dubbed a historic landmark

By Peter Dykstra
CNN Science and Technology

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It's the first landfill to become a landmark.

The United States Interior Department designated the Fresno Sanitary Landfill in California a National Historic Landmark Monday, adding it to a list of 2,350 distinctive and historic sites ranging from Boston's Fanueil Hall to Chicago's Wrigley Field.

There's a catch: The landfill already holds a more dubious federal recognition: It's been on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Superfund cleanup list since 1989.

One of 15 sites named historic landmarks by Interior Secretary Gale Norton Monday, the Fresno landfill operated from 1937 to the late 1980s. The landfill passed the sniff test with Interior officials, archaeologists and local preservationists for its "national significance in American history and culture," according to an Interior Department press release.

No mere monument to waste, the Fresno site is singled out for pioneering sanitary landfill designs still followed today.

"It is the first landfill to employ the trench method of disposal, and the first to utilize compaction. At the Fresno site, the layering of refuse and dirt in trenches to minimize rodent and debris problems" was the first of its kind, the Interior Department said.

The site's Superfund history sounds less appealing: California state health officials detected contamination from methane gas and volatile chemicals near the site in 1983.

The city announced the site's closure four years later, and the landfill received its last garbage delivery in 1989.

Last year, EPA, city and state officials completed a $10 million cap to contain the contaminants within the landfill site, and work was begun this month on a pumping system to control runoff from the Fresno landfill.

Other notable landmarks include San Francisco's Alcatraz Island; Abe Lincoln's Tomb in Springfield, Illinois; the Library of Congress and Blair House in Washington; and General Motors' headquarters building in Detroit.

A reporter's search of some 2,300 other sites on the list revealed no other landfills with historic status.