Fisher: Snow Hill overlooked too long

Despite the recent agreement between GLF and environmentalists which is set to tackle issues with the Sampson County landfill and provide remedies to many of the problems that have existed, citizens living in the Snow Hill community say they continue to suffer the lasting impacts.

At the heart of the settlement is helping those residents who say they have felt the lasting impacts of the landfill’s discharge for decades. There’s an untold number of individual stories that could be told, but a small glimpse into what life has been like can by seen through the eyes of Paul Fisher — a man who’s lived in the Snow Hill community since the beginning.

“I live on Marion-Amos Road Road which is next to the cemetery; the landfill is probably, I‘d say, within a half a mile, maybe less, from my house,” Fisher said. “It’s affected me through the noise which I’ve been bothered by with the trucks and the heavy equipment.

“The smell, it’s bothered me with them releasing the gases when they do whatever they were doing over there years ago,” he added. “The gases have affected me. I can recall one of the times I thought I had a gas leak in my house. It was late at night, I was trying to find spray bottles, trying to find where a gas leak was, and come to find out, it was from the fumes at the landfill.

“That’s one of the main things that sticks in my mind, and, like I said, the smell.”

Fisher has lived in Snow Hill since the 1970s when the home he still lives in was built. And he was there when the landfill first arrived in Sampson. He’s witnessed its growth into the mountain that sits there today and, he said, he was there when things started taking a turn for the worse when it expanded some years ago.

“We built the house here in ‘75 so I’ve been living here since 1975-76, and I’ve been here the whole period of the landfill,” he said. “I think they started expanding the thing in the 1990s, if I’m not mistaken. I can’t remember, but the trucks, at one time, a lot would come by my house carrying dirt and stuff to put in the bottom of the landfill. That was after they laid the plastic and it was being hauled from around Roseboro.

“Since then it’s only gotten worse with flies and there’s a lot of buzzers around,” Fisher said. “I don’t have that much problem with them but basically it’s just the smell. I can’t mention that enough. Sometimes you can’t get out like normal people and enjoy your backyard and have a picnic or have a gathering because of the smell, especially if the wind is blowing that way.”

Because the settlement’s aim is solving some of those long-standing problems, Fisher said he was glad to know relief might actually be on its way.

“Well, to me, it feels pretty good,” he attested. “It’s taken a long time, and we’ve been kind of saying things and fighting this fight for 20 to 30 years or so. But again, it feels pretty good to know that they are starting to do things to clear up some of the things that they were doing. At least as far as the smell, the noise and whatever else that was going on.

“Those gases coming from the landfill, that just wasn’t a one-time thing;they were on a regular basis, I’d said I think probably every night. Once you realized what it is, you can’t do nothing about it. You just live with it, trying to keep the doors and windows closed. Even when we do that, it gets in your vehicle if it’s parked outside. It would mess your paint up on your vehicle and stuff like that.”

To pile onto the smell and noise problems Fisher noted, health concerns are another aspect of the landfill issues, and it’s introduced PFAS contamination into Snow Hill.

PFAS or Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is group of synthetic chemicals that are resistant to water, grease and heat. They are known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down easily and are persistent in the environment.

That contamination has spread into the ground water, well water and other areas such as Bearskin Swamp. That has led to a multitude of Snow Hill residents needing water filtration systems and/or county waterline hookups just to have access to clean water.

Fisher said while the water issue hasn’t particularly impacted him, it has been a problem for his neighbors.

“Well after a short period of time, they ran the county waterline through here and we were asked to join, to get hooked up to the water,” he said. “I didn’t do it then because I had a deep well pump which went down 90 feet, so my water was good. It always had been good. But, over a period of time, I decided to go ahead … I came to the conclusion that the best thing for me to do was to get hooked up to it.

“Well, I did that, but my well water was good up until that time,” Fisher acknowledged. “I don’t use it now so it might be messed up, but back then, a deep well of 9o to 100 feet or something, you wouldn’t have that much problem with it. For those people that had 15 to 20 foot wells, they would’ve been having some issues before I did, and as you can see, they have.”

The settlement is a step in the right direction, Fisher said, and could go a long way towards ending the long struggle over the landfill. But it’s a fight, Fisher said, that will never end.

“It’s not over and it never will be over,” he attested. “The landfill will be here from the next 15 to 20 years, or whatever it is, I don’t know. I guess they’re just going to, instead of expanding it, they’re going upwards with the thing. It’ll always be a mountain and it’ll always be in sight.”

Even if the other problems were fixed, Fisher said the visual of the eye mountain in, itself, brings its own problems to Snow Hill.

“It affects your property value out there because the first thing somebody will be told, if you do an analysis of property, is how far it is from the landfill or it’s adjoining the landfill,” he explained. “So your property value goes down, even though the tax (rate) goes up or stays the same. That’s something you have to live with, and this is home for me, so I don’t see any reason why I should have to leave.”

“I mean, this is home. But if I had a choice, now, then I don’t know whether I would move here or not,” Fisher stated. “I would move, maybe in the area but maybe not here. So that’s also what’s happening if you’ve got property here. Even if somebody wants to buy or sell here you have to cut your price down lots because of the landfill.”

It’s not just property values that Fisher said was hindered by the landfill as PFAS in the ground damages their ability to have agriculture — the county’s biggest financial asset — in the area.

“It impacts even our farm value, as some of the farmers around here said that people don’t want to lease their property to grow certain produce they want to grow, because it’s next to the landfill,” Fisher said. “Whether it’s vegetables or whatever, when you try to sell it on the market, I think you have to state where it comes from, or something. So, if it’s sucking up the water runoff, then everything that’s coming from the landfill is going up in your plant and vegetables and stuff.

“Because of that, gardening is a concern so people don’t have a lot of gardens around here,” he added. “I kind of have a little something now, but, I guess with the runoff and everything, though I can’t tell it. But I guess, if I was to be tested, be it my water, my blood or something, then probably you’d find out that I have a bunch of PFAS, and whatever else, like lead waste or whatever in my system.”

“So, while I’m glad for the coming changes, we’ve been living here, in our minority community, dealing with these landfill issues for many years — I feel like we were overlooked for far to long,” he said. “I’m grateful but at the same time I feel like we’ve been neglected by our county commissioners who should’ve done something about the landfill years ago.”