The first phase of Karepovac's rehabilitation was completed on Saturday and the works will resume in the fall.
Since November 22, 2018, when excavators began attacking the garbage dump in the east of the Dalmatian Capital, more than 700,000 cubic meters of municipal waste and 30,000 cubic meters of construction rubble were transferred, accounting for about 70 percent of the projected planned volume, reports Slobodna Dalmacija on May 6, 2018.
Over the last couple of months, the rehabilitation has transferred decades of waste disposed at the site all to free up space and build a concrete slab, or a sanitary landfill, where new garbage will be disposed until the county waste management center in Lećevica is built.
Residents of the surrounding villages including Kila, Mejaši, Šine, and Solin should feel the most relieved from because of this break in remediation. The smell caused by the evaporation of landfill gasses, primarily ammonia and mercaptan, was so unpleasant on some of the rehabilitation days, that even yesterday the smell came to Gripe, Veli Varoš and Spinut. Citizens thus feared that the rehabilitation of Karepovec would endanger health.
However, the Split City Office constantly denied the claims, stating that no harmful gasses were measured in the air, constantly reassuring that the prescribed values of the concentration of gases have been recorded following the Regulation on levels of pollutants in the air. They also noted that contractors at the site itself continuously measure the values of gases, and at no time have the limit values exceeded the Regulation. The amounts of sulfur dioxide, ammonia, floating particles of PM10 with metal content, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide and mercaptan at the Karepovac measuring station are available at Čistoće Split: http://www.cistoca-split.hr/informacije/mjerenje-kvalitete-zraka .
In any case, the people of Split no longer have to live in fear that the odors from Karepovec would drive out tourists who are already filling the city streets. And who knows, maybe five years if they return to Split, they might be playing golf on the green hill of Karepovac, providing the construction works of the Center in Lećevica go to plan...