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Silicon Valley's Latest Desperate Housing Idea: On A Landfill (siliconvalley.com) 186

Posted by EditorDavid from the down-in-the-dumps dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Silicon Valley real estate developers want to construct a $6.7 billion housing complex over a former landfill with 5.5 million tons of municipal waste from the last 25 years. "The regulators were pretty skeptical at the start, I have to say," one of the firm's partners told a local newspaper. Besides the 1,680 units of housing, there'd also be 700 hotel rooms, plus 5.7 million square feet of office space, and 1.1 million square feet for retail stores. The project "includes elaborate safety systems to block the escape of combustible methane gas and other dangerous vapors, and to prevent groundwater contamination," according to the Bay Area Newsgroup -- including one foot of solid concrete over 30 acres of landfill, with the housing built above the first-floor shops and parking structures "as a way of creating additional distance between residents and any escaped gases in the event of an emergency." In addition, there's alarms and sensors, "as well as another system to monitor, collect and dispose of gases underground."

Though the project has gained key approvals from the city of Santa Clara, it could still take two decades to complete. "Last year, the City of San Jose sued the City of Santa Clara, charging that the imbalance between the project's jobs and housing -- 23,000 jobs and 1,680 housing units -- will increase housing demand in San Jose and tax its overstretched services and infrastructure... but both sides said they hope for an out-of-court resolution."
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Silicon Valley's Latest Desperate Housing Idea: On A Landfill More

Silicon Valley's Latest Desperate Housing Idea: On A Landfill

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  • What could go wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09, 2017 @09:50AM (#54773093)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:What could go wrong (Score:5, Interesting)

      by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:05AM (#54773143)

      The Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View was built on landfill and fires broke out when concert goers lit up their joints.

      In its opening year, a fan attending a Steve Winwood concert flicked a cigarette lighter and ignited methane that had been leaking from a landfill underneath the theatre. Several small fires were reported that season. After those incidents, the city of Mountain View commissioned methane testing studies to define the location of methane vapors emanating from the soil within the amphitheater. These tests were used in developing a design for improved methane monitoring and more efficient methane extraction to assure the amphitheater became safe as an outdoor venue. Ultimately, the lawn was removed, a gas barrier and methane removal equipment were installed, and then the lawn was re-installed.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreline_Amphitheatre#Built_on_a_landfill [wikipedia.org]

      • The Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View was built on landfill and fires broke out when concert goers lit up their joints.

        Very well said, because clearly rock and roll and no-good dirty hippies and their narcotics are the problem here, not building regulations and uncontrolled natural gas.

        • not building regulations and uncontrolled natural gas.

          Errr, while this is methane, and methane is the main component of natural gas, this gas that is a product of decomposition of artificially-collected material is not what you'd normally describe as "natural gas".

      • Note that the ampitheater on the landfill is not a corporate building. Ie, it's light, you don't have to worry about the ground subsiding, etc. The Google campus, previously Silicon Graphics, was at the edge of the landfill I believe, and not build on top of the landfill (I could be wrong).

        I would be skeptical of multi-story residential/office on top of landfill.

        I just saw the map in the paper today, and it's just a couple blocks from where I work and I walk past part of it. Right now it's mostly golf co

    • The whole problem with Love Canal is not that it was built on a landfill, it's that people had been dumping toxic waste there...

      There is no mention of that in this landfill. If there's no toxic waste then what's the problem? What many here seem not to understand is that building stuff atop old landfills is extremely common; what did you guys think happened to them anyway???

      • The whole problem with Love Canal is not that it was built on a landfill, it's that people had been dumping toxic waste there...

        There is no mention of that in this landfill. If there's no toxic waste then what's the problem? What many here seem not to understand is that building stuff atop old landfills is extremely common; what did you guys think happened to them anyway???

        So you're sure that no toxic waste was dumped at this landfill? And that landfill operators and dumpers are inherently trustworthy enough to be entrusted with our health? I only know of one re-purposed landfill site in my area, and there have been gas issues there. I do know of some others that are not being built upon, even now that they are no longer taking in garbage. If you want to live and work on top of dumps, go for it, but I'll pass.

        • So you're sure that no toxic waste was dumped at this landfill?

          There's always some but to the same degree as Love Canal? No. That was *21,000 tons of toxic industrial waste*, not a bottle of drano or whatever.

          And that landfill operators and dumpers are inherently trustworthy enough to be entrusted with our health?

          Irrelevant as when they build atop the things they seal them off apart from venting.

          If you want to live and work on top of dumps, go for it, but I'll pass.

          You probably already have. Personally I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Well, basically by trapping the methane, you build a methane bomb. This methane bomb will last centuries, far longer than the concrete enclosing it. Now if you are not in a high risk earth quake zone, you are most probably not safe (differential soil movement, lack of control joints, high corrosion, high moisture to attack the concrete and penetrate to the reinforcement and of course all sorts of microbes live in that mess). Now if you are in an earth quake zone, you can pretty much guarantee a major failur

        • Or, you do the obvious, and use your concrete cap to control where you release the gas emissions, and feed it through a catalyst that burns the methane down to (much less harmful) carbon dioxide.

          Or, if there is a lot of gas being produced, you collect it and pipe it into a gas-fuelled generator set and get ... well, at least enough power to run the pumps and monitoring system, and quite likely more.

      • And the people who dumped the toxic waste there did disclose that it was there and the government decided to build a school on top of it anyhow...

      • Enjoy your multiple sclerosis disease cluster.

  • Good (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm glad the idiots that live in Silicon Valley and spew garbage will now be living on it too

    • What garage are they spewing?
    • It's no different than San Francisco building on top of landfill from the 1906 earthquake.

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:19AM (#54773207)

        It's no different than San Francisco building on top of landfill from the 1906 earthquake.

        Yes, yes it is MUCH different than what they built on in San Francisco. There are two different meanings of landfill here. In the case of post-1906 San Francisco, the buildings were built on land that was created from what was formerly waterlogged areas. Backfilled with soil and other debris. The biggest risk with this type of "landfill" is liquefaction during an earthquake.

        Here they are talking about building on top of a mountain of modern municipal and industrial wastes. Many of these wastes are still in the process of decaying. So you've got methane needing vented, various toxic metals and chemicals that need to be ensured they are contained etc.

        So yes, they are VERY, VERY different.

        • As the organic material decays it will settle, resulting in your foundations cracking. This will result in plenty of gaps for toxic or explosive gasses to enter your house, and will reduce the lifespan of your home.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Doke ( 23992 )
            Also consider that California gets quite a few earthquakes. They should help crack up the concrete, release the methane, and create sinkholes.

        • This land was probably wetlands a few decades back, it's at sea level at the south end of the bay. Very close to the salt ponds. Drain the marsh, put garbage on top, put a golf course on top of that, then later try to put some major construction on top of it.

      • It's no different than San Francisco building on top of landfill from the 1906 earthquake.

        Would you mind affiliate-linking us to a book on Amazon about that?

        • I haven't read any books about the 1906 earthquake. I had read "The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market's Perfect Storm" [amzn.to] by Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr. What made the 1907 panic so acute was that the U.S. supply of gold was on the West Coast for reconstruction after the 1906 earthquake and it took weeks for gold from London to arrive. When depositors demanded their money back in hard currency, the gold supply on the East Coast was extremely limited and it forced the financial titans to impr

      • That reminds me of reading that one of the problems in 1906 was buildings built on top of landfill. The ground almost acted like a liquid in some places - not good for structures on top.
        Simon Winchester wrote an excellent book on it (although some would be annoyed that he diverges into a lot of other topics in that book).

  • Start locating businesses in places where employees can have nicer homes and lead better lives.

    • It used to be that landfills were turned into golf courses.

      I guess the area already has enough?

      • It used to be that landfills were turned into golf courses.

        In Phoenix, I lived next to one of these. It had its own methane collection system that included a periodic nocturnal flare-off, so it didn't depend on Californians sparking up their joints.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sycodon ( 149926 )

        Isn't San Fran built on what is essentially a landfill?

        • Boston is.

          http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]

          • As someone else pointed out, "landfill" has two different meanings. Boston's landfill is stuff like dirt and rocks that was used to fill parts of the river. This article is talking about the garbage dump kind of landfill.

            The map is pretty impressive, though. I've lived in New England my entire life, and I never knew how large the Boston landfill area is until I looked at a map a few months ago.

      • This land currently IS mostly a golf course! And a small BMX track, and some settling ponds, etc.

    • That might work in the short term but you eventually end up with the global equivalent of sprawl where the entire planet is covered in tract housing and office parks and asphalt. It's not sustainable. We should be looking for long-term sustainable solutions now, before it gets to be a serious problem. At some point humans will need to shed all these materialistic desires and evolve to the next level, whatever that may be. We can't just keep making things that only exist to sell so humans can acquire other t
      • There are 2 types of people who, like you, preach universal poverty. One type is trying to fool everyone else into being poor, thinking that will make them rich. The other type, the thoroughly evil ones, really do want everybody to be poor.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lucm ( 889690 )

        We can't just keep making things that only exist to sell so humans can acquire other things. A society of things...

        It has worked pretty well so far. What's your alternative? Going naked to the beach and writing poetry in the sand so it vanishes with the next high tide? Creating community gardens and trading organic tomatoes for soybeans and goat milk? It has been tried before, and most of the people involved in that lifestyle ended up selling real estate in Malibu and driving convertible BMWs.

        Jeez even in videogames like Fallout the fun is in collecting stuff and building nice settlements that generate income so you can

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        humans will need to shed all these materialistic desires and evolve to the next level

        The Matrix. Good movie.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      So, not California then?

      Washington State is full. Fuck off.

    • But then they have to worry about their employees being lynched by the `alt-right'.

  • I know of several housing developments that were built there over former landfills
    • Were they in earthquake zones? Landfill tends to liquefy even more than regular soil, and when it's mixed with garbage and methane .... well .... shake and bake, baby. One more reason not to live in Silly Valley.
      • Much of San Francisco and several entire cities nearby are built on landfills. We get earthquakes regularly and engineers have figured out how to build stable structures for the area. You need good anchoring and design, which isn't cheap. Thankfully real estate is sky high here so affording earthquake proof structures isn't out of reach.

        • Funny you should bring up San Francisco - it has a great example of how engineers screw up [bloomberg.com]

          The building, which opened in 2008 and was touted as the most luxurious tower in San Francisco, became a beacon of the city’s burgeoning wealth, attracting tech millionaires, venture capitalists, and even the San Francisco 49ers retired quarterback Joe Montana.

          The 58-story tower's shine faded on May 10, 2016, when Agabian attended a homeowners association meeting and was informed that the building had sunk 16 inches into the earth and tilted over 15 inches at its tip and 2 inches at the base, according to suits filed by residents and the city of San Francisco. “You can imagine how distressed we were to know that, for one, our lifetime investment and savings are at risk,” she said. “And we have no idea whether or not there’s a fix to it, and if there is a fix to it, what it will entail.”

          The building, meanwhile, continues to sink.

          It may not even be fixable.

          • Yeah that one cracks me up, everyone that bought there is super rich so the lawsuits are gonna be spectacular. The engineers didn't screw that one up, they suggested the expensive preferred method of sinking piles into bedrock. The developer decided to ignore their advice and cheap out with stubbies that only go down into garbage. It saved many millions but will cost way more than that in the long run. They hired a crooked firm to fake engineering data to back their corner cutting.

    • I know of several housing developments that were built there over former landfills

      I know of one housing development that was built on an old cemetery. They, too, thought it would work well.

    • I lived in Milpitas in the 90s - was caught in the El Nino storms of 1997, where my new car was washed out weeks after I had bought it. It was built on a landfill - if one drove West off the Nimitz to Dixon Landing Road, one would end at the landfill, or could take McCarthy Blvd southbound.

    • I know of several housing developments that were built there over former landfills

      I know of several operating landfills that are nicer than most housing developments in New Jersey.

  • Apartment? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:14AM (#54773191)

    As I scroll around Santa Clara I see lots and lots of single family detached housing and, probably, duplexes. A mobile home court. A BMX track.

    How about zoning for some apartment buildings? The citizens will fight tooth and nail against it, but if you want affordable housing, that's what you build.

    • Re:Apartment? (Score:5, Informative)

      by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:22AM (#54773217)

      There's tons of apartment buildings being built. All along Tasman by Cisco are massive apartment/condo complexes, and the old IBM facility off Cottle Rd had a 1000 units recently completed.

      Nobody is building new stand alone single family homes. High density, multi-story apt or condo complexes, complete with pools, rec rooms, gyms and shopping on the first floor are the norm. If there's a single family home being built, it's being ruled with an iron fist by HOAs that charge $300/mo for nothing.

    • Mixed developments are common along the light rail lines and major transit routes in Silicon Valley. These typically have a concrete ground floor for retail and parking, and four stories of apartments or condos built from wood. I live off the Winchester light rail line. All the warehouse buildings that used to serve the canneries in San Jose are being replaced by mixed developments.

    • There are very few apartments outside of NYC which are investments. If you want vertical growth you need to give people other than the land owner reason to put up money. As is, pay 5K a month in SF for a couple years and what do you have to show for 120K? Nothing!

      People don't want apartments for this reason. Apartments are seen as a necessary evil until you can afford something which is actually yours.

      • Look at census data; nationwide iirc it is around 35% of households in apartments, and we have less than 50% home ownership. Different people have different desires; I live in a rental multi-family home because it lets me be close to work, close to the beach, not need a car, and provides more disposable income. (As a hedge against rent inflation, I do own a condo-- but it is just a vacation spot for now.) The buy vs rent equation for my wife and I makes buying a poor investment; this is dominated by our e

        • Yes there are different needs, but those who can afford a house, condo, duplex, or even a mobile home purchase because they want something of their own. You may have heard the phrase "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". Part of "Happiness" is property, and the right to protect that property. (See Adams, Madison, Monroe, etc... and the Constitutions drafted for States).

          In SF, homes are priced beyond single family median income. Costs are artificially driven up by property conglomerates who purc

          • Your thinking is so rigid. It is a simple fact that being willing to move for better jobs is strongly correlated with much higher income. Being weighed down by a house makes that decision much tougher. Also, you are stuck. I know so many people that used to live near work but now live 2 ugly hours away from work due to job changes over the years. They can't afford to sell/buy near work due to Prop 13 and cost gradients. They hate their commute and feel trapped by their investment. Sure they are rich on pape

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by s.petry ( 762400 )
              I know far more people who drive 2 hours to work to have their own house, than I do people who could not change jobs because of where they live. This is true not just in CA, but Michigan, Texas, Kentucky, and VA where I have worked and lived. Having your own house is an investment, paying rent is disposable income. When the money is close, people want the investment.

  • One foot of concrete is relative... (Score:3)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:17AM (#54773203)
    Many houses in the valley are built on 6" slabs. The replacement building for the McDonald's near my home has a one-foot concrete foundation with reinforced steel, conduits and drains. When they built the fire lanes for San Jose State University in the 1990's, the foundations were three-feet deep to handle the weight of multiple fire trucks.
  • they're remaking every other movie.
    • just think if chickens have souls.... poultrygeist!

      • just think if chickens have souls.... poultrygeist!

        What of all those buried shoes!

        (For the humor and pun impaired, what do you call the bottom of a shoe? Think about it.)

  • Think of it as. . . . (Score:3)

    by msk ( 6205 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:36AM (#54773267)

    Will the roofs have diving boards?

  • Landfill not the major problem... (Score:3)

    by XSportSeeker ( 4641865 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:37AM (#54773271)

    I've read about this yesterday, and what came to mind is that building housing on a landfill is not the major issue there... it's the desperation part.

    Of course people behind the project will try to dissuade skeptics with fancy tech buzzwords and whatnot saying they will take proper care and do it right, but the thing is that landfills are pretty much unpredictable. They are only accounting for stuff they can imagine will happen, and even so, I highly doubt they'll invest much into it.

    And then, of course, when housing is desperatedly needed and these construction firms are expected to get huge profits from it, they will cut corners the first opportunity they get. This isn't charity with limitless funding, it's business.
    It's cheaper for them to deal with liability later on than really spend all the money possible to make sure nothing bad will happen, because it's a game of probabilities.

    Then again, people have been moving to big urban centers to live a crap live inside shoebox sized apartments all the time, closing all windows to avoid the smog, noise pollution and whatnot. Living on top of a landfill doesn't seem too far out. And I'm willing to bet that when these get available, they'll still sell for too much.

    • The best thing about living on a landfill: free methane gas. Burns just like propane!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lucm ( 889690 )

        And if you dig because you want a pool, you can end up with free Atari videogames or maybe find the sunglasses I threw away by mistake in '06. None of that can happen on normal land.

    • Re:Landfill not the major problem... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @12:12PM (#54773703)
      Landfill tends to not be compacted as well as regular soil. Consequently it tends to liquefy more easily during earthquakes, leading to uneven settling and destruction of homes built on top. Nearly all the homes which collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake [wikipedia.org] were in the Marina district which was built on landfill (albeit mostly from dredging the harbor). (They were also 3-4 stories, which happens to have a resonance frequency matching that of most earthquakes.)

      Smell is not an issue. The landfill is typically covered with several layers of barrier [freshkillspark.org] several feet thick, including watertight plastic sheeting.. Drainage holes are left along the sides to capture and treat excess water which manages to seep in when it rains, while methane recapture piping extracts gases which build up due to biological decomposition for resale. A friend's house is built on landfill and he never would've known it if I hadn't remembered the location as being a landfill from back when I was in high school.

      You can build on it, but the buildings have to be built much more sturdily than if built on regular soil, and you're still screwed if the ground settles unevenly causing the home's foundation to break. Usually the land is used for non-structural purposes, like a park.
    • It's not that grim. There isn't any undeveloped land around here. The opportunities for a conventional large development simply aren't there. You need to buy an existing office park, level it at great expense, then rebuild. They are doing this at literally hundreds of sites all the time, all over silicon valley. You never know what you'll get with these old office parks. Often there are hazmat issues. I think it's a testament to how strong the area is that it is cost effective to build on a landfill despite

  • That's sort of a gamble, assuming that there will be the intense need for housing in the area in 20 years time. Sure, they'll be able to fill it with people, but will the market let them make the money back?

  • Chemicals (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @10:44AM (#54773303)
    The reason you don't do this is because there's often dangerous chemicals all over landfills and the cleanup is too expensive. Odds are is this is allowed we'll be hearing about the cancer rates there in 20 years. But by then the investors will be long gone.

  • This would be a waste of money not to mention a bit dangerous given the stability of landfill in an earthquake zone. What they need to be doing is rezoning their residential zones to build up. There is way too big a demand for housing for silicon valley to maintain its large regions of suburban housing. Really, this should have been done a decade ago but short sighted voters wanted to maintain their property values and now they have their entire service industry living three families per house.

    For a region

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      but short sighted voters wanted to maintain their property values

      I'm not sure downplaying that will solve any problems. It's people's homes. They presumably picked their homes because of various criterias that fit their life styles. They liked the location, the neighborhood. They potentially spent years looking.

      And then you come in and tell them they have to give it up, essentially for only the benefit of others (at least directly. Indirectly it could benefit them, but that's harder to measure).

      This isn't l

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        You can when the people who sell them their food live in what amount to suburban slums.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shados ( 741919 )

          As long as we find ways for "the people who sell them their food" to live there SOMEHOW, this will just keep happening. As long as you have those lottery equivalent affordable housings. As long as you let people live in illegal apartments. As long as you subsidize it.

          Make it impossible, and sooner or later the food prices will go up (and food prices fluctuate very quickly). People will either pay the marked up price (which will allow people selling the food to live there), or will no longer want to live the

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by skam240 ( 789197 )

            The free market fixing things in this case would be allowing developers to buy up houses, bulldoze them, and then build 20 story condo and apartment buildings. This is literally how major cities like New York got to be major cities.

            To put it in other words, there is a shortage of supply to meet housing demand. Right now zoning laws are preventing the supply to go up to meet the demand thus eventually creating our out of control housing prices we see today.

            No offense but what you describe sounds more like ru

  • If you allow cardboard shelters for human habitation, and sell more refrigerators, there won't be any housing crisis in the bay area...

  • They really need to talk to the construction company that built the landfill islands around Tokyo, which also knows something about earthquakes. That is when the artificial land you make suddenly semi-liquefies, dropping buildings down into the ground or pushing pipes up through manholes. That, and the awful smell and sickness that sounds likely to come from the U.S. plan makes it sounds like a pretty bad idea...

  • 12" thick concrete. That's an incredible 2" thicker than most basements.
  • Never learn from history. Part of San Fran, wrecked in the Earthquake of 1906, was built on an old landfill. How did that work out for ya?
  • I still don't understand why these corps are so resistant to simply letting people live in places where there is room left for people to live. There must be so much untapped talent in this country. I'm in the process of moving my family for my own reasons, and it isn't a pleasant experience. Long time friends are angry at us and say they won't visit us in the new place. I have the distinction of being the one to split up my extended family after 40 years of being together in the same place. Even though

  • When I lived in LA/South Bay, Manhattan did a lux development on a landfill with a methane collection system.

    • The landfill sites in Manhattan Beach are former military waste as I understand it; it sounds like you are talking about the mall and golf course. I know they have contaminated soil, but I don't think there was ever a (sanitary) landfill. (There is plenty of methane collection in LA, but that is due to the oil and not landfills.)

      • you are correct, not sanitary. I had to look it up. It was old tank farms from chevron. The development was called manhattan village. Build around 85.

  • Instead of "trapping" the methane, capture it and use it. Put the proposed development area someplace safe and connect it with high speed, oh say, "hyper" light rail.
    Still cheaper than what they are planning.

    Of course if we did post consumer sorting and recycling we'd have much less for the landfills and extract metals, paper pulp and compost with very little left over. It was profitable in Japan with a lot of human workers (the system was designed by an American who couldn't get buy in stateside). With a
  • From the What-Could-Possibly-Go-Wrong department: Who the bloody HELL knows what's actually in that landfill? We've been here before, whether anyone remembers it or not, and I'll tell you this much: I wouldn't live there if you PAID me ON TOP OF free rent for life. Stupid idea.

  • Tried it 50 years, FAILED (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AnalogDiehard ( 199128 ) on Sunday July 09, 2017 @04:45PM (#54774797)
    50 years ago in Endicott NY, they built a shopping plaza on top of a small landfill. The site was so unstable that the buildings and parking lot were constantly settling. It became an extremely rough ride driving through the parking even at a crawl.

    The plaza was finally closed about ten years ago, and was demolished. No new development is permitted on that site.
    • City View Center in Garfield Heights, just outside of Cleveland, is a similar but more recent failure. The EPA admitted they had no idea what all was in the landfill, because monitoring was very poor when it was in operation and jobs trumped regulation (why does that phrase sound so relevant now?). There have been gas issues, an unusual rate of rare cancers in the area, and settling that has resulted in building problems. It has also been an economic failure.
      • A lot of us knew what would happen before it happened. I'm far from a bleeding-heart liberal. I'm a socially conservative libertarian in fact. But even I thought that building on that landfill, or any other in the region (since they basically all sucked by current environmental standards, which themselves are written more to protect those who successfully bribe the EPA than the public) could only end in disaster. The level of graft and corruption in and around Cleveland is just staggering. Maybe not Ch
  • Shoreline Amphitheater was build over a landfill. You know that moment at the start of a concert when everybody holds their lighter up? They ignited the methane coming off the landfill! File this under, "What could possibly go wrong?"

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