History
The landfill opened in 1947 in what was then a rural agricultural area. The initial plan for a temporary landfill called for Fresh Kills to be used for 20 years then developed as a multiuse area with residential, recreational, and industrial components.
At the peak of its operation, the contents of twenty barges – each carrying 650 tons of garbage – were added to the site every day. In 2001 the landfill was 25 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty, and it was estimated that, if kept open, the landfill would have eventually become the highest point on the East Coast. Under local pressure and with support of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the landfill site was closed on March 22, 2001, though it was temporarily reopened soon after (see below.)
Originally the land that the landfill was located on was a salt marsh. The subsoil was made up of clay, with sand and silt as the top layer of soil. The land still contains large amounts of wildlife within the boundaries of the landfill. There were tidal wetlands, forests, and freshwater wetlands.
Read more about this topic: Fresh Kills Landfill
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)