The ‘horror story’ of hazardous waste in a small Pennsylvania town

By Kiley Bense | Inside Climate News

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Read Part 1 of this story: Pollution from a Westmoreland Co. landfill caused problems for decades. Fracking waste made it worse

When government inspectors arrived at the hazardous waste landfill here in 2023, they found themselves in a barren and alien landscape carved from western Pennsylvania’s green countryside.

As they documented operations at Max Environmental Technologies, they climbed fields of blackened waste and photographed pits, mud, debris, stained walls and unlabeled storage containers. Their images offer a startling—and largely hidden—juxtaposition to the rolling hills, horse paddocks and chicken coops around the 160-acre site. What the inspectors captured confirmed the worst fears of Yukon’s residents, who have blamed the landfill for serious health impacts and called on regulators to intervene for years.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found rusted open containers of waste, clogged pipes and a containment building used to store untreated hazardous waste “in pretty significant disrepair.” They watched as rainwater mixed with that waste and flowed from the damaged building.

“There was a hole in the roof and it was raining during the inspection,” said Jeanna Henry, chief of the air, RCRA and toxics branch in the enforcement and compliance assurance division of the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic Region. RCRA is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates hazardous waste.

The landfill accepts industrial waste like contaminated soils, acids and dust, as well as waste generated by the oil and gas industry that contains heavy metals and radioactive materials. Pennsylvania is the country’s second-largest producer of natural gas, and much of the industry’s solid waste ends up at landfills such as this one.

After its March 2023 inspection, EPA alleged Max Environmental had failed to “minimize the possibility of a release of hazardous waste” at its Yukon site; failed to submit 26 required discharge monitoring reports; failed to report all sampling results of the waste the company had processed, or “treated,” to make it non-hazardous; failed to provide adequate training for employees; and failed to properly operate and maintain the facility in general, including leaks, damage and deterioration.

“The treated hazardous waste was not meeting the land disposal restriction requirements. It was actually still a hazardous waste, and samples that we took out of the landfill showed the same thing,” Henry said. “That’s very significant. So we have concerns that the treatment that Max is performing is not adequate.”

Carl Spadaro, the environmental general manager at Max Environmental, said initial testing of its treated waste showed compliance “about 90 percent of the time,” which he called “consistent” with historical results in a statement to Inside Climate News.

“Any treated waste that does not pass initial testing has always and continues to be re-treated until it meets required standards. This kind of practice is common in the hazardous waste management industry,” Spadaro said.

During EPA’s March 2023 visit to the landfill, inspectors found that treated samples exceeded standards for cadmium, lead and thallium, a tasteless, odorless metal that was once used as a rodenticide but was banned because of its toxicity. Thallium can come from materials released by the oil and gas industry and a few other sectors.

A backhoe on a cleared patch of land in a wooded valley.

In 2024, EPA issued administrative orders under RCRA and NPDES, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, that require Max Environmental to fix problems inspectors found. The RCRA order temporarily halted disposal of hazardous waste on the site—that work has now restarted—and mandated that the company hire an approved third-party contractor to make repairs and test treated waste.

In a November interview, Henry said the landfill was meeting its deadlines under the RCRA order but was not yet in compliance with its permit under the hazardous-waste law.

Spadaro told Inside Climate News in late December that the company is “in compliance with our permits.” But on Jan. 16, the EPA said that was not the case: “Max is not currently in compliance with either RCRA or NPDES permits related to the Yukon site.”

“We take this very seriously. There are significant violations at this facility,” Henry said. “Our mission is to protect human health and the environment. We do want to ensure that the residents have access to clean drinking water and their land is not being contaminated.”

Lauren Camarda, a spokesperson at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said the state agency has “worked collaboratively” with the EPA on compliance and enforcement actions related to Max Environmental. “DEP will continue to support the EPA, which is the lead environmental agency on the consent orders, and will continue to inspect the facility to ensure MAX is in or comes into compliance with applicable laws and addresses the issues identified in the consent orders,” she said in a statement.

Since those orders were issued in April and September 2024, residents have noticed a change in the landfill’s operations. “They have these great big spotlights that light up the facility. I haven’t noticed lately that they’ve been turned on,” said Debbie Franzetta, a longtime Yukon resident. She said she has observed less noise, dust and light in the last year.

“We take this very seriously. There are significant violations at this facility.”— Jeanna Henry, official with EPA’s Mid-Atlantic Region

This is not the first time the government has cited the company and its predecessor for wrongdoing. From the late 1980s onward, the DEP noted violations at the site on more than 110 occasions, but little seemed to change. Given this history, residents are skeptical of the government’s commitment. As the Trump administration lays off hundreds of EPA employees and plans to roll back environmental regulations, what will happen to the agency’s orders for the Yukon landfill is a question mark.

“I think they should close it,” Franzetta said of the site. But she worries about what would come next. “One of my greatest fears is that if that happens, they’re just going to get out of Dodge, is my comical way of saying things. But it’s not any laughing matter, believe me.”

A continuous hive of industry

A few minutes from the tangle of off-ramps where the Pennsylvania Turnpike meets I-70 about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh, Yukon emerges as a cluster of homes and farms set on sloping Appalachian hills. Big yards are filled with tractors and trampolines.

“This is really the heart, the fire hall back there,” said Stacey Magda, the managing community organizer at the Mountain Watershed Association, a local nonprofit that works to protect the Youghiogheny River watershed and has fought for stricter enforcement of the regulations governing the Max Environmental landfill.

A woman sits in the passenger seat of a car.

Magda sat in the passenger seat as her coworker, Colleen O’Neil, steered the MWA truck past the volunteer fire department’s nondescript building where they often hold meetings and through the area’s winding roads, the tree line bright with the copper foliage of October.

Magda describes herself as someone with “roots stretched deep in the Pennsylvania dirt.” She grew up in a small town in the central part of the state and came to love the rivers and trails of the Laurel Highlands, a region of southwestern Pennsylvania that includes this county, Westmoreland.

The drive through the community took her past heaps of coal spoil, where she said kids liked to ride bikes, and the ancient-looking stone ruins of the old coal company. Mining gave the town its name; one of the mines the landfill was built on top of is called “Klondike.”

Yukon once lay at the center of a “continuous hive of industry”; a local history from 1906 describes a valley of hamlets in Westmoreland County where “manufacturing of almost all kinds is carried out” and “from almost every hill, coal mines, shafts, tipples may be seen in every direction.” Hundreds of coke ovens, burning coal, filled the horizon with smoke.

A large pile of coal waste in a wooded area.

In the early 20th century, the valley was roiled by a mining strike that lasted for more than a year and involved 10,000 miners protesting for better wages and an eight-hour workday. The strikers, many of them Slovakian immigrants, were defeated.

In the Catholic cemetery next to the landfill, you can see this heritage in generations of chiseled Eastern European names. Except for the distant rumble of truck traffic on the highways, the valley was quiet as O’Neil and Magda drove, the sky a sharp blue.

But that extractive past isn’t truly gone; it’s buried in the layers of the Max Environmental landfill. From coal mining and steel manufacturing to oil and gas drilling, the story of the landfill mirrors Pennsylvania’s.

“There’s a lot of pride in this town about being a town where industry and coal mining is a part of their heritage,” Magda said, “but having Max Environmental come to town has been a whole different kind of side of industry that’s been really brutal on the people that live here. And it’s been going on for so long, over 40 years now.”

A home beside the cemetery has two banners hanging out front. One is crammed with red and black text. “No more hazardous waste in our backyards,” it says, listing the violations found at Max Environmental by the EPA and the DEP in recent inspections. “No more excuses! No more chances! Shut down Max and clean it up!”

The second sign is more concise: “Trump 2024: F— Your Feelings.”

Trump/Vance sign and other election signs along a dirt driveway.

Conservative yard signs are displayed on a small farm in Yukon, Pa. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News

A long sing that reads, "No more hazardous waste in our backyards" in a cemetary.

A sign opposing Max Environmental is displayed next to a Catholic cemetery by the landfill. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News

To Harder, his observations at the outfall and the monthly testing done by the MWA show that Max Environmental is still not doing enough to meet the standards outlined in its permits. EPA’s testing also shows violations for four of Max Environmental’s 10 total outfalls at Yukon between 2021 and 2024. As of January 2025, Outfall 001, the one at Sewickley Creek, was listed as non-compliant or in violation for more than 15 kinds of water pollution, including oil and grease, zinc, cyanide and cadmium.

“If you have a polluter like Max who is handling some of the most dangerous solid waste you can create in the eastern part of the United States, they should really be on top of their wastewater treatment system,” Harder said.

The danger to residents and the environment isn’t just from one exceedance, he added, but from “the cocktail of all those exceedances mixed into one outfall.” Harder said he has seen toy shovels and pails on the shoreline downstream of the pipe. “Personally, I wouldn’t let my kids play in the water there.”

John Stolz, a professor of environmental microbiology at Duquesne University, echoed Harder’s concerns. Stolz has accompanied Harder to Sewickley Creek to sample the water. “I was shocked at what the discharge was,” he said.

Conductivity is used as an indicator of water quality, measuring how electricity moves through liquids, and changes can indicate increases in pollution. Stolz’s reading of 20,000 microsiemens was far beyond the EPA’s typical range for rivers in the U.S. of 50 to 1,500. It’s double the number the EPA gives for typical industrial water.

After an October 2023 inspection, Spadaro emailed Sharon Svitek, program manager at DEP’s Bureau of Waste Management, to ask if the visit was prompted by “a request from the Mountain Watershed Association.”

“Can you shed some light on why DEP sent a small army of people to conduct waste sampling at our Yukon facility today?” he asked in an email later released through a public records request. Spadaro called the inspection “unnecessarily disruptive to our operations” and said the company should have been given a “heads up.”

Spadaro also asked why DEP had given the association a copy of the EPA’s July 2023 report about an earlier inspection of the landfill. “We don’t know why DEP would do that especially since it is an EPA document,” he wrote.

A view of Sewickley Creek in Yukon, Pa. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News

DEP’s Svitek explained that the Mountain Watershed Association had obtained the document through an informal file review and the department was required to comply because it is a public record. The MWA later published the document on its website. Svitek clarified that the inspection was requested by DEP’s central office and had been used as a training opportunity for new employees.

When news of the EPA’s inspection and consent orders reached the Mountain Watershed Association and Yukon residents, there were mixed feelings.

“Everyone was validated. It was this moment of, ‘My gosh, every single person’s instinct was right,’” Magda said. “And that was horrifying.”

The Concerned Residents of the Yough

The MWA is only the most recent local group to call for change at the landfill. “Prior to us, residents in Yukon have been working on the issue of Max Environmental for many years, and they’ve been saying the same thing over and over and over again,” Magda said.

In the 1980s, residents worried about the health impacts of the landfill, then known as Mill Service and under different ownership, formed a grassroots citizens’ group called CRY, for Concerned Residents of the Yough. Diana Steck was one of the founding members. When she moved to Yukon in 1978, she did not know about the landfill’s existence, though she noticed an orange glow in the sky near her house on some nights, and sometimes the air outside smelled terrible.

Steck said she began to get frequent respiratory infections, coughs and hives. She developed joint pain and muscle weakness. Her infant son was stricken with nosebleeds, ear infections and asthma. Her daughter had seizures. Her husband came down with a chronic rash. Steck’s childhood asthma returned. She would later be diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease.

A sign that reads "Say No to MAX" is tacked onto a tree, with a trailor home in the background.

It was only after reading a newspaper article about the landfill that she wondered if the health problems she and her family were experiencing could be connected to pollution. Steck was a nurse, and she set out to investigate the possible impacts of chemical exposure from the site. What she read convinced her that it was the cause of her family’s problems since coming to Yukon.

Later, going door to door in her neighborhood with a petition about the landfill, Steck discovered she was not alone. “One street, almost every home, somebody had cancer. There were so many kids that were sick with asthma, chronic rashes, the nosebleeds, frequent infections, a lot of neurological problems, Parkinson’s, seizures, things like that,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Steck and the members of CRY held demonstrations and press conferences, requested state records, traveled to the state capital, fundraised and wrote letters to regulators and politicians. They sought help from environmental and public health experts outside Pennsylvania, including Lois Gibbs, the organizer who fought to raise awareness about pollution at her home in Love Canal, where her children’s elementary school had been built on top of a toxic landfill.

None of it seemed to make a difference.

“It was so frustrating,” Steck said. “I thought in my heart that if somebody elected to public office heard a mother telling them that this facility was making her kids sick, that they would shut it down, clean it up, and that would be the end of it. I was raised to think that the government’s there to protect you. Well, so much for that.”

Steck said she was told by an EPA official in the 1980s that Yukon had been “deemed as expendable.”

“She told me, ‘The waste has to go somewhere.’ Those were really hard words to hear,” she said.

In 1990, members of CRY filed a lawsuit against the then-owner of the landfill alleging that residents “have suffered severe and substantial impairments to their health, property damage, damage to their livestock and pets.” According to CRY’s litigation records, housed at the University of Pittsburgh, the lawsuit was abandoned by the group in 1994 for financial reasons.

“I was raised to think that the government’s there to protect you. Well, so much for that.”— Diana Steck, former Yukon resident

Eventually, Steck said, her declining health forced her to move about 10 miles away from Yukon and resign from the group she had helped to found, but she continues to advocate for change at the landfill.

“I was a 30-year-old mom when I was the most active, and I fought so hard and almost died. I never, ever thought that, here I am, at age 70, I’d still be in this fight.” She paused. “I just want to see justice done.”

In 2022, at a hearing related to the company’s permit application to expand the landfill site, the testimony of resident Misty Springer transported Steck to when she was also a young mother trying to persuade the state government to acknowledge her family’s struggles.

Springer said she had suffered six miscarriages after being exposed to runoff from the landfill. She had a question for the DEP: “How many people on your block have cancer? How many people in your town? Because I bet your town is bigger than mine, and I bet you my town has more people with cancer than yours.”

A close-up of a lock on a chain around the gate of a chain-linked fence.

Driving on Millbell Road, a narrow street that runs along the northern boundary of the landfill, Magda ticked off the cancers and illnesses of each home’s inhabitants. At least one of the houses sat empty.

The MWA’s involvement has brought some residents a renewed sense of optimism. “I kind of gave up on the whole deal, until these kids from the Watershed got involved,” said Craig Zafaras, who has lived in Yukon for decades. “I commend them for their effort.”

There is an easy affection between Magda, who is in her thirties, and the older residents she’s come to know through her work. She looks out for them, jokes with them, walks them to their cars.

But rallying the town to speak out against Max Environmental has been difficult. Distrust in any information about the landfill is high. Residents are unconvinced of the government’s promises, and wary of hope. For so many of them, it has been a very long road.

When Magda knocks on doors to tell residents about the next meeting or hearing, just as the women of CRY used to do, she has been laughed at by people who ask her, “What are you going to do about it?”

A close-up of an older woman pointing at something.

“People have gotten older, and a lot of the community has died, and people just get discouraged,” said Debbie Franzetta, the longtime Yukon resident. “It’s kind of like banging your head against the wall. You knock on doors to try to get people to come to meetings. You spend the time to go and write letters, and nothing really comes of it.”

Despite the obstacles in her path, Magda remains resolute: “I can tell you, we’re never going to give up.”

“Our Battle Against the Dump”

Residents wonder what will happen to the site and its six decades’ worth of waste. In 1985, the state shut down disposal at the Yukon site because of leaks and failure to abide by new rules governing waste, but the next year, Pennsylvania’s environmental protection agency approved a permit for expansion. Opened in 1988 and covering 16.5 acres, the Yukon site’s Landfill 6 is the last active impoundment and is nearing capacity.

In 2024, the company estimated the impoundment would be filled by 2026.

Max Environmental had planned a new expansion that would add space for more than 1 million tons of waste, but in 2023 it withdrew the permit application following resistance from residents and environmental groups, saying it would resubmit the application “at a later date.”

Spadaro said the company withdrew because it did not have enough time to respond to comments from state regulators. “DEP has a very restrictive review timeline for new commercial hazardous waste treatment and disposal permits,” he said.

Spadaro said Max Environmental has “not scheduled any other plans for expansion at this time.”

“We are focused on addressing all items in EPA’s consent orders,” he said.

“EPA has no plans of going anywhere,” said Henry, the official at the EPA. “We’re going to be focused on this facility for quite some time.”

Exposed dirt and rock, with some sort of tarp or fabric mixed in.

She gave that interview in the waning months of the Biden administration, and it is unclear how the EPA will approach regulating Max Environmental and sites like it under the new Trump administration.

EPA funding and staff have been early targets of its efforts to dismantle federal agencies, and 388 employees were cut in mid-February amid a push for large-scale layoffs and resignations. All of that could make it more difficult for the EPA to keep its focus on Max Environmental.

In a 1998 scholarly article, Dan Bolef, an academic and activist who was involved with CRY, described the “torments” of Melbry and Tony Bolk, whose farm lay across the road from the landfill. The Bolks saw “their health deteriorate, their herd of cows strangely sicken and die, their rural world of peace and security shattered by the noxious effects of the dump,” he wrote.

For Bolef, who died in 2011 , Yukon’s experience had become a “horror story,” an endless montage of people who tried to fight back but got sick, moved away or gave up, defeated by the intractable landfill. “What, then, is one to do? How are we to react when our community suffers?” he asked. “There is nothing left for us to do but continue the struggle.”

By 1998, the site had been open for more than 30 years. Bolef echoed a sentiment that would sound familiar to Yukon’s residents today, 27 years later. Despite the impression locals had been given that the landfill would soon run out of space, he wrote, it increased its operations, even as the number of residents dwindled around it.

“In our battle against the dump,” he wrote, “the dump usually wins.”