If you found a nice house at a good price that was 4 miles away from a landfill, would you still consider living there?

Totally depends on how big and how well the landfill was managed.

Good as long as the lagoons were not too smelly.

It would depend which ways the winds blow. 4 miles really isn’t very close, but if the wind usually comes in from the west and the house is east of it, I’d worry about the smell.

I didn’t even know it’s a health hazard, and I’m usually pretty up on things that people are nervous about. Lol. It drives my husband crazy. Is it the gas? I guess it produces methane, is that right?

I would have kept looking.

There’s too little information for a fully informed response, and here’s why:

1. It matters when the landfill was started, that is, under what rules, and how well it has been constructed and managed since then. Modern landfills are excavated and lined with impermeable clay first, and then that is topped with another layer to protect the clay itself. So in that case there’s no leaching of the landfill’s content into groundwater. Older landfills – and you can’t very well retrofit an existing landfill – were not “built” in this way; they were mostly just existing hollows or depressions in the local geography and far enough off the beaten path to be mostly unobjectionable.

2. Second, it matters where your drinking water comes from. Do you use an on-premises well? How deep is it? How often has the water been tested, and for what substances? If you use piped-in “city water” from a metropolitan water company which uses professional and high-quality management techniques, then that’s less of an issue.

3. Third, if you DO use a deep-water well, then are you geologically upstream or downstream from the landfill? That’s important for reasons that should be obvious.

4. You’re actually probably more at risk if you live close to actively managed farm fields. Fertilizer runoff (and to a far lesser extent, pesticides) are more likely, more widespread and in general more damaging if they get in your drinking water.

So the answer is… “it depends”.

I used to live about 3 miles from the San Leandro dump. You could really smell it on Sunday mornings.
Check the normal wind direction.

I would consider it.

If you are on city water, it probably isn’t an issue from your potable water. It probably has an odor that will not be pleasant, but that isn’t necessarily unhealthy either, just unpleasant.

I would definitely consider it as four miles isn’t very close but I would check the prevailing wind direction and try to get some more information from the state’s department of the environment website. If there are problems there may be public forums that discuss the issue. What might be an issue is the route the lorries take to service the landfill.