Residents filled Columbian High School’s auditorium to get questions answered at the meeting organized by the Seneca County General Health District and moderated by the county’s public information officer, Dean Henry.
She said the health board delayed a vote on licensing department and is researching the issues – one of the main reasons for the public forum.
“We noted the complaints had risen,” she said.
He said Ohio EPA ordered the landfill Jan. 31 to take several measures in hopes of alleviating the odor and has been consulting with US EPA and other agencies to find solutions.
He said calls increased greatly October through December, which prompted Ohio EPA to work with the health department and take samples downwind from the landfill.
Brdicka said a new hydrogen sulfide treatment system is being installed, which began in December.
Projects coming up this year, he said, include expansion of gas collection systems, new wells that allow gas to be drawn more quickly after waste placement, a new hydrogen sulfide treatment system, an impermeable odor control blanket, additional clay cover on the east slope for increased odor control, continuous hydrogen sulfide sampling stations, increased environmental monitoring and a new website and community outreach program.
Joining the three agencies to help answer questions were representatives from the Ohio Department of Health and Tim Wasserman, director of Ottawa-Sandusky-Seneca Solid Waste Management District.
The forum was scheduled after about 80 Fostoria-area residents attended the December health board meeting to object to the renewal of the landfill’s operating license.
The board had been scheduled to vote on the renewal, but delayed its decision and decided to research the issue.

ANN ARBOR, Mich– There are currently 40 sites statewide that are being investigated for PFAS, but here in the state, we have a facility unlike any other in the world that’s helping make sure water is safe.
NSF International is currently the only water products testing facility in the world that’s studying and approving filters that can flush out the chemicals, which are man-made and have been linked to health problems like thyroid issues and cancer.
Companies are currently clamoring and spending tens of thousands to get the NSF stamp of approval on their devices.
"We test it to make sure that it’s safe to use, that it`s not going to have substandard materials that might actually contaminate the water," said Rick Andrew, a water treatment expert with NSF.
As NSF scientists plug away at a more permanent solution, their outlook for the thousands of affected residents is mostly good.
"We have continued to see the number of manufacturers requesting us to test their products for PFAS reduction to grow and grow and we expect that trend to continue," said Andrew.
"I’m pretty positive.
I’m kind of a glass-half-full kind of guy and I see the future as bright because we’re getting a handle on the problem and we’re doing something about it."
It will tell you what you actually need protecting against.
Another important note: boiling your water won’t help.

State environmental officials say a southern Delaware poultry processing facility with a history of wastewater violations has reported an accidental discharge of up to 1 million gallons of partially treated wastewater.
Officials say Arkansas-based Mountaire Farms reported that the release was discovered about 5 a.m. Wednesday after a wastewater system component failed.
Mountaire says the release was contained onsite, with no discharge to nearby Swann Creek.
Last year, Mountaire agreed to pay a $420,000 civil penalty and offer an alternative water supply to nearby residents whose wells have been contaminated with high levels of nitrates.
In a consent decree with state officials, the company also agreed to address problems with the wastewater treatment system at its Millsboro plant.
Mountaire is also being sued by area residents complaining of water pollution.
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“Water quality trading (WQT) is an approach that offers greater efficiency in achieving water quality goals on a watershed basis,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a 2003 policy.
Now, EPA is trying to give WQT a jump-start: Last week, the agency’s top water official, David Ross, told EPA regional administrators in a publicly released memo that EPA wants to move toward more market-based solutions to nutrient pollution — water quality trading in particular.
“The new guidance is certainly helpful in many ways that will help with certainty.” “We’re happy to see that EPA is throwing support behind water quality trading,” said Kristiana Teige Witherill, Clean Water Project Manager at the Willamette Partnership in Oregon and the lead on strategy development and facilitation for the National Network on Water Quality Trading.
“A lot of times it may be cheaper (for dischargers) to work with farmers and landowners in the watershed to do a conservation practice” than pay for improvements to their own treatment facilities, said Larry Antosch, Ohio Farm Bureau’s senior director for policy development and environmental policy.
The program mostly uses models to measure reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus, but also has a couple of in stream monitors, Fox said, emphasizing the "rigor" of the program.
Water quality trading definitely has critics, however.
“We call it water pollution trading,” said Scott Edwards, co-director of the group’s Food & Water Justice project.
Environmental groups raise other issues, such as the use of modeling to measure water quality improvements.
The Mississippi River watershed, however, takes in all or parts of 32 states.
Reed, for example, says C-AGG has been working for nearly two years to develop an Ecosystem Services Market Program.

Dead fish washed up along the shoreline at Bayfront Park in Sarasota last August.
[Herald-Tribune archive / Mike Lang] Event could be held at Robarts Arena or Sarasota Municipal Auditorium in April SARASOTA COUNTY — A water quality summit hosted by the county to address problems plaguing area waterways could happen as soon as April.
The summit, which will address efforts the county and surrounding jurisdictions have made to create clean water, as well as ongoing efforts to reduce water pollution and toxic red tide, will take approximately 90 days to organize, County Administrator Jonathan Lewis said.
The planning of a summit — at the urging of Commissioner Christian Ziegler — comes after the area faced the lengthiest documented toxic red tide event since the 1940s, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials.
After more than a year, lab tests in late January by FWC showed red tide concentrations around Florida were rated at “not present” to “background” concentrations.
More recently, tests showed red tide blooms in Sarasota and Manatee counties have dispersed, at least for now.
Water samples taken earlier this month by FWC showed bloom conditions remained offshore from Monroe County, where medium levels of the red tide organism were detected.
In addition to the expansive fish kills and human health effects, such as respiratory irritation, the outbreak caused hotel occupancy to drop by 11.3 percent in Sarasota County during the last three months of 2018, the steepest year-over-year decline during that quarterly period since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and a sign of just how bad red tide has been for the region’s economy.
The commission last November considered joining with other local governments to enact voluntary fertilizer bans year-round, to curb nutrient pollution that could boost toxic red tide, in turn also sending a powerful message to state legislators that counties and municipalities must have more control over issues plaguing their jurisdictions and diminishing their citizens’ quality of life.
Currently, the state prohibits year-round fertilizer bans if a county or city fails to meet stringent criteria.

The recent contamination of water in the huge Narmada Dam catchment area is snowballing into a big mystery as the authorities and environmentalists have locked horns over the possible reason behind an imminent disaster.
The authorities have explained that the sulphide contamination in the millions of acre feet (MAF) Narmada water body has been caused by mild seismic activity that caused a fissure in the river bed through which toxic gases have seeped in from the core of the earth.
If this explanation is accepted as correct, environmentalists feel there is a danger of a quake hitting the dam in the long run.
The Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Limited (SSNNL), the apex agency for the dam and canal network, had last week suspended water supply to 138 villages in the vicinity due to reports of sulphide contamination accompanied by mass death of fishes in the reservoir.
As the needle of suspicion pointed towards possible dumping of untreated chemical effluents by dubious factory owners, the authorities first attributed the sulphide content leading to mass death of fishes to decrease in dissolved oxygen in the upstream areas and also huge amounts of water being stagnant for two years due to insufficient rains.
Later the authorities shifted the blame to a suspected seismic activity underneath the huge reservoir that might have released toxic gases into the water body.
The seismic activity explanation raises a very fundamental question about safety of the dam in the longer run, Vadodara-based environment activist Rohit Prajapati told The Statesman on Wednesday.
Acknowledging that it is not possible to contaminate such a huge water reservoir by dumping some untreated effluents, Rohit Prajapati said the authorities must thoroughly investigate the real cause behind the disaster.
Prajapati, along with other concerned citizens, has shot off a letter to the Narmada Control Authority (NCA) to disclose the reasons behind the sulphide contamination and decrease in dissolved oxygen levels which led to the mass death of fishes.

Gov.
Tony Evers called for more clean drinking water measures Wednesday, including funding to address contaminated wells and a new drinking-water study in three southwest Wisconsin counties where nearly half of wells recently were found to be contaminated.
Evers said in a statement his proposal for the next state budget will allocate $2 million in funding — a $1.6 million increase — for a state program that helps replace, rebuild or treat contaminated private wells.
The Well Compensation Grant Program gives funding to eligible landowners or renters to address wells that serve a residence or livestock.
It will provide a new option for families below an income threshold that permits the Department of Natural Resources to pay as much as 100 percent of costs as much as $16,000 to replace or treat contaminated wells.
Evers also said he directed the state Department of Natural Resources to spend $75,000 in the next budget cycle on a study to evaluate drinking water safety in Grant, Iowa and Lafayette counties.
A study released last month found 42 percent of randomly selected wells surveyed in those three counties were contaminated, failing to meet federal standards for bacteria that can come from animal or human waste, or for a toxic fertilizer residue.
The announcement came after Evers revealed earlier this week that he will propose in his budget allowing the state to borrow nearly $70 million more over the next two years to combat water pollution and replace lead pipes.

Released on 31 January, the review compares the effectiveness and costs of technologies tested in laboratories or through field trials to remove arsenic in groundwater — a health threat to at least 140 million people in 50 countries, according to the World Health Organisation.
The report says any arsenic removal technology must bring drinking water up to the WHO standard, which limits maximum arsenic concentration per litre of water to 10 micrograms.
Technologies that were developed most recently, in 2017, and passed the WHO standard came from the United States (using a ZeroWater® water pitcher filter) and India (using aluminum electrode).
Of the 14 removal technologies that were tested in the field, efficiency levels ranged from 60 to 99 per cent, with only five achieving the WHO standard.
Four of these technologies were developed in India: using an electro-chemical arsenic remediation (ECAR) reactor; activated laterite; a combination of sodium bicarbonate, potassium manganite and ferrous chloride; and one that uses ferric hydroxide as arsenic absorbent.
The fifth technology that achieved the WHO standard came from China, using iron minerals and limestone.. Arsenic contamination areas.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
For field-tested technologies, the cost of treating one cubic metre of water ranged from almost zero to about US$70.
Apart from cost limitations, some of the lab-tested technologies were shown to have harmful impacts such as producing sludge, or to require more research.
Soumya Balasubramanya, a senior researcher at the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute – CGIAR, tells SciDev.Net that the recommendations outlined in the UNU report are important for policy-making in developing countries battling the arsenic crisis.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will become the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
"It is time for that to change."
Investigators later determined that Department of Environmental Quality officials misread federal guidelines and did not require use of corrosion-control additives.
The executive order also establishes an environmental justice team with representatives from other state departments including natural resources, agriculture and transportation.
Clark said she would make the case for increases with the state budget office.
Under Snyder, the DEQ and an interagency task force conducted statewide testing of drinking water sources and initiated cleanups at highly contaminated sites.
Whitmer signed a separate order making the group a permanent fixture in the new department and assigning it to coordinate Michigan’s PFAS actions, including continued searches for contaminated water supplies, informing the public and recommending new laws.
The department will consider a tougher standard for initiating cleanup action than the current threshold of 70 parts per trillion that is recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Clark said.
The Michigan Agency for Energy, a separate entity under Snyder, will become part of the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy – as will the Office of the Great Lakes, currently part of the Department of Natural Resources.
Additionally, the department will have a new office on climate policy that will seek ways to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and promote renewable energy while helping Michigan adjust to a warmer world.

For years, Californians regarded access to safe drinking water as a Third World problem.
About 1 million Californians can’t safely drink their tap water.
It’s a disgrace that demands immediate state action.
Gov.
Gavin Newsom proposes taxing water across California to create a dedicated fund to solve the problem.
Water experts estimate the need to be about $150 million a year.
But in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta town of Isleton, just 90 miles from San Jose and 40 miles from Walnut Creek, residents’ tap water contains enough arsenic that it is unsafe to drink.
It’s inevitable that if the state continues draining the Delta to send water south it will eventually pose a serious, long-term threat to the quality of Bay Area residents’ drinking water.
For example, Californians last fall wisely rejected Proposition 3, which would have devoted $500 million of an $8.9 billion water bond package to cleaning up the state’s drinking water.
Monning has yet to re-introduce his legislation this year.