Nebraska Soils Field Trip - Virginia Tech

4th IUSS Soil Classification Conference Field Tour Guidebook
This stop is at the closed Sarpy County landfill in Bellevue, Nebraska. Duwaine Brigman, Director
of the Sarpy County Division of Environmental Control, will speak to us regarding the history
and closure of the landfill. The landfill has been closed for 23 years, hence time zero for soil
formation is known. The pictures below represent the type of equipment used to close the
landfill in the late 1980’s.
Figures xx. Heavy equipment used to compact and create the earthen cap when closing the
Sarpy County, Nebraska landfill in the late 1980’s.
The entire property is a “constructional” anthropogenic landform (i.e., sanitary landfill). The
landfill did not exist at the time the field work for a prior soil survey was conducted between
1963 and 1969. The property is currently mapped and delineated in the Sarby County soil
survey area (NE153) as map unit 9967--Sanitary landfill, but no soil property data is provided.
Null data is not permitted for human-created landforms which are soil-covered, such as
landfills. Landfills are not an approved kind of miscellaneous area for the National Cooperative
Soil Survey and standards now dictate that soils be correlated and property data populated for
closed (i.e., soil-covered) landfills.
The final recommendations of ICOMANTH proposed changes for human-transported material
(HTM), buried soils, the surface mantle of new soil material, and human-altered and human–
transported material family classes that will be discussed here. We will observe 2 soils formed
in the landfill cap. Nitrile gloves are available for your use at this site. Please use them and
avoid getting any of the soil material in your mouth or on any other mucous membranes. If you
note the trace element data, the ^Bwb1 horizon at pit 1 contains elevated levels of Hg. The soils
were described by Dan Pulido, Valerie Jaehrling, Steve Montieth, Shawn McVey, Dan Shurtliff,
and Ken Scheffe.
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