During his 12 years at Englewood Golf Course in Colorado, superintendent David Lee has seen some goofy things pop out of the ground, such as wigs, bowling balls, and car bumpers. But pop-up junk here is something less than surprising: the course sits on a curvaceous mound of trash some 40 feet deep. In some places, all that separates the velvety green from the garbage is a few inches of sod.
Two years ago at a converted landfill called Renaissance Park in Charlotte, North Carolina, a soccer mom went after a stray ball that had fallen into an eroded hole around a light pole. To see in the shadows, she pulled out a pocket lighter. An exploding fireball blew her several feet back from the methane-filled hole. Fortunately, she suffered little more than minor burns and a bad case of the shakes. Signs discouraging open flames and smoking in all five of Charlotte’s landfill parks were quickly posted.
There are far more tangible signs of the waste that lies just inches below the Renaissance landfill cover. On an afternoon after a gentle rain, the ground at the park’s 18-hole golf course crackles like the sound of Rice Krispies. The noise comes from large patches of mud bubbling with gas. It looks like polenta boiling on the stove, observes retired course superintendent Robert Orazi. But it smells like rotten eggs. Last year, Orazi gave up after six years of coaxing the grass and trees to grow on two feet of soil baked dry from the heat of rotting garbage below.
The course is also plagued by uneven settlement that dimples the fairways, tilts putting greens, breaks irrigation pipes, and turns cart paths into rolling whoop-de-doos only a dirt biker would love. Then there’s the Blob, a foot-tall lump of wiggly amber-colored ooze creeping out of the fourth fairway. We tried shoveling it; we tried covering it. It just comes back, says Orazi. Tests show it to be a kind of alga that feeds on the iron-rich liquid that seeps up from below. And pop-up waste? Among the scariest finds, says Orazi, are blood bags and syringes. More typical are the tires and rubber hoses that literally float up through the soil.
