Pollution potential of pit quarries employed as waste-disposal sites

The use of abandoned pit quarries as waste-disposal sites presents a problem of potential water pollution if leachate is carried through existing channels to areas far removed from the depositional site. A geophysical procedure based upon an electrical resistivity method was used to map small concentrations (volumes) that would represent leakage, or migration, of the leachate from the filled pit. The dipole-dipole electrical resistivity field procedure was found suitable for monitoring leachate from the waste-disposal site known as the Gray Clay mine. An inverse modeling procedure employing alpha centers was adopted to locate small pockets of highly conductive leachate. Although the alpha-center-inversion technique appears to be quite promising as a method of monitoring sanitary landfills for their pollution potential, considerable work is required to refine the method to a practical application method.