Lucky owner of few cubic yds of unidentified gunk

[Taylortractornut]

Jim I work with the EPA and DEQ and some of my friends there tell me that to get a safe sample without too many questions is to not tell them its at your home. Just incase its not hazardous but has to be removed because it doesnt meet codes. He said several olks have taken stuff to a lab to get it diagnosed and ended up spending thousands of dollars in waste removal for things like burried nonhazardous trash. They say you found some in a local road ditch or or canal bank I hate to lie about something but im also very leary of some folks. It was common practice for folks to dump in pits around their homes. When mom and dad first moved here dad was a foreman for a construction company and was awayfrom home. Our house had been moved to this location by the previous owners after TVA bought the land for the Tenn Tom waterway.
Hard times had mom and dad not able to have about 5 of the previous owners cars and 5 or 6 sheds sheds hauled off so dad brought home the 580 Case backhoe he stored for his bosses. Ithe sheds were burned and burried and the cars were also burried. Its killing me to know a GTX is still under our leach field. A few years later when the house burned dad couldnt afford to have the old wet drywall and demo scraps removed so the backhoe came home again.

 

[jim_wilson]

I am also extremely leery of telling anybody in authority about this. That is why the first batch that I dug up a while back just got quietly disposed of bag by bag in the roadside trash pickup every week. I used to work in a car dealer and heard a number of stories from customers who got caught in the web of different govt. agencies when they had leaking oil tanks, unknown junk buried in their yards, etc. The town I live in get's its water from wells so I figure I am already doing a good thing just by digging it up and not reburying it on my property. I don't need , don't see the moral justification for, and can't afford to, pay fines if some govt. agency gets involved. Frankly I wouldn't even try to get this stuff analyzed if I had to identify myself to a govt. agency. All somebody would have to do is show up at my house one day while I was at work and see the big pile of bags stacked up behind the house and know something was going on. For now it is going out in the weekly trash pickup until I can come up with a better solution to dispose of it quietly.

 

[Ranashi]

Jim that sounds like how mine came out of the ground. I started off finding my garbage by clearing black berry bushes and a pile a tree limbs. Found a corner on a garbage bag... and it just went down hill from there. I would have to agree with Taylor if you do tell them it might be better to tell them you found it along the road that someone tossed. I was going after previous owner through lawyers on mine at the time so I didn't care if it went to DEQ or not. The person from DEQ was honestly really cool about it he said this is how we say to dump it this is what we do with it and this is what you have. Then said good thing all that was found was this little piece so he didn't have to report it to anyone (he knew I had all the siding from the house laying in a rather large pile in my yard under indoor outdoor carpet covered by nicely cut black berry bushes thanks to the previous owner)... I don't know how much it weighed, as I didn't move it myself but it would have easily added to the 5 tons. Sorry to hear you are stuck with someone else’s garbage bill it really does suck I can attest to that myself. I can honestly say in my case it was well worth it in the long run.. if they would have spent the time and/or money to clean up the yard my land wouldn't have raised over 50k in value this last year. Still lots of work to do.....drive way is next!

 

[mrcaptainbob]

Wow, Spiker!, Next to you and Ranashi, I'm small potatos!

 

[CTyler]

Just read this and it sounds like drywall and/or mud. When we built our house we had a trash pile with among other things partial boxes or drywall mud and drywall. When buring the wood etc.. it was getting late and I sprayed it all down and then covered it with dirt. Well it sat there for a number of months with rain, snow etc.. until it dried out enough to get a dump truck in to haul out stuff. When uncovering the one pile it had a couple smelly grey goo spots just as you described. It was the drywall mud.

Have a nice day. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[jim_wilson]

I know the stuff -whatever it is - is not any sort of construction residue. There is too much other trash mixed up in it for it to be that. The house was built in 1956, some of the trash that I have dug up included pop top TAB soda cans, TAB did not hit the market until 1963 and it was in bottles initially so my guess is that none of this stuff entered the ground before sometime in 1965 - and probably later. The other thing I notice with this stuff is when it is left out in the sun it dries out and is crumbly. The sheer volume of it ( I have found even more since I hit the initial jackpot ) and the fact that it is all the same means to me that it is burnt garbage or trash. Since the volume keeps increasing my options for getting rid of this stuff are starting to get very limited. I am going to follow one of the previous posters recommendations and contact dumpster companies and tell them I have a quantity of trash that was dug up out my backyard and see what they say. Anyone that says they will have to test it or anything I will just stay away from.

 

[RonR]

Wife's granddad was a pack rat--he saved old jars and empty food cans for his whole life, plus his dad lived in the same property, so it had his garbage there also.

The farm sale to get rid of all the "good" stuff took two days. As was warned to us by the auctioneers, people bought boxes of stuff, took out what they wanted, then left the rest on the ground. Literally, the ground around the buildings was several inches deep with junk.

We had to wait 30 days for people to remove their stuff. Then we hired a dirt mover to come in and dig a 12ft wide, 10 ft deep and 50ft long trench. We FILLED it with stuff from the yard. Fortunatly, I had an 801 ford w/ FEL at the time, so we used it to scrape stuff up. Kids and others helped by tossing stuff into old stock tanks. When the tanks were full, I'd push them to the pit and dump them in.

When the pit was FULL the first time, we set it on fire to reduce the volume! When it cooled down, we loaded it up again.

The dirt man came back and buried what was left.

As bad as it seems to you, it might be your easiest option, if you have room on your property to do that. Of course, it might toss you in the loop of RESPONSIBLE if it turns out hazardous.

Cleaning out Mom's house, we checked on dumpster prices. It was about $400 drop charge, a couple hundred a week, PLUS so much a pound to dump it. We went with Plan B and rented a trailer to dump it ourselves...........

Hope this helps.
Ron

 

[DiskDoctr]

Mark,

The price of junk is up (steel prices). Could probably give the cars to a local salvage yard who will pick them up and take them away without charge- as long as you're giving them away. Serviceable cars sometimes get $100.

Good luck.

-JC

 

[SPIKER]

so far around here all the junk yards seem to be CLEANING up, one I was at today, got rid of about 500 cars in the last 2 months... really made it nice but then they are also loosing all the parts for older stuff if you want old cars parts are going gonig gone...

MarkM /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

 

[BobReeves]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( so far around here all the junk yards seem to be CLEANING up, one I was at today, got rid of about 500 cars in the last 2 months... )</font>

Tax man at work, some states make the salvage yards pay inventory tax or some such BS tax on the cars they have in the yard. Lots of old part cars have been turned into scrap because of this.