By Ally Lanasa, Staff Writer

(Feb. 11, 2021) EA Engineering will continue to monitor groundwater and provide analytical services at the Central Landfill Facility in Newark for the 2021-22 calendar years.

The Worcester County Commissioners last Tuesday agreed to extend its arrangement with EA for approximately $182,000. The amount is an increase of nearly 12 percent from the 2019-20 calendar years and results from the additional analytical and reporting requirements from the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) along with the inclusion of Cell 5, said county Public Works Director John Tustin, P.E.

John Tustin

Tustin added that $91,000 is budgeted annually for this effort.

To meet the Department of the Environment’s requirements, Tustin listed the necessary efforts in his memorandum: “increased costs associated with laboratory analytical services and the expanded sampling, collection and reporting efforts to include the Method 8011 analyses; increased effort for field personnel and reporting requirements with MDE, which include an increase of approximately 20 additional hours per sampling event due to the additional monitoring efforts for the Method 8011 analyses; and increased effort for statistical analysis, interpretation of results and report preparation, approximately 30 hours per sampling event.”

Furthermore, as a result of assessment monitoring, groundwater protection standards were developed in 2017 as required by the Department of the Environment. Besides the statistical analysis previously performed, additional statistics are now performed to determine statistical increases over groundwater protection standards at each event. Also, now that landfill cell five has been constructed, statistics for the cell five wells are now required and are performed at each sampling event.

Funding is available and will be included in current and future solid waste operating budgets.

Commissioner Anthony “Chip” Bertino asked if other companies could complete the work.

Tustin replied that in his memorandum he noted that the Public Works Department did bid the same type of groundwater monitoring services at the three closed landfills in the past and EA Engineering’s bid was significantly lower than its competitors for the work.

The county commissioners voted unanimously in favor of the proposal.