Municipal officials and residents who live near the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill in Rostraver on Thursday voiced frustration and anger over its continuing operation and what they say is a lack of adequate state regulation.

Their remarks at a virtual news conference hosted by Protect Penn-Trafford, a community organization, highlighted problems with light and noise pollution, landfill runoff into tributaries of the Monongahela River, noxious odors, health problems possibly related to toxic chemicals in runoff, and radioactivity at the facility, which accepts significant amounts of shale gas drilling and fracking waste.

Gillian Graber, executive director of Protect P-T, said its recent survey of people who live near the landfill found that 70% of the more than 100 respondents have been inconvenienced by truck traffic and mud on the roads. More than half said municipalities and the state Department of Environmental Protection had been ineffective in fixing the problems.

Deborah Fought, who lives across Patton Road from the landfill, said gasses from the facility burned her eyes when she was outside two weeks ago and have been a longstanding and continuing problem.

Of particular concern this winter is a trail of mud from garbage and wastewater transport trucks stretching from the landfill for two miles on Tyrol Boulevard and Pricedale Road to the Interstate 70 interchange, and on Route 906.

John Lorenzo, president of the Rostraver board of commissioners, said the township and other communities in the Mon Valley have had “major issues” with the operation of the landfill, but can’t get any response from its owner, Noble Environmental. He said he had received no help from the DEP, which regulates such facilities.

“It’s been an ongoing battle and struggle with the landfill to get it into compliance,” Mr. Lorenzo said. “We try to do everything we can, but we’ve lost faith in the DEP. We’ve relied on the DEP as a regulatory body and left things in their hands, but now with the mud, the smell, the environmental impact, we don’t want to just stand by. We’re looking to do more.”

He said the township has enacted a regulation to control runoff from the landfill, and has contacted an environmental attorney to investigate legal options.

Pennsylvania landfills are not allowed to accept liquid waste, but such facilities generate runoff from storm water that falls on and flows through them.

The Westmoreland County landfill began accepting shale gas drilling waste — soil, rock and chemicals — in 2010. In 2018, it took in 159,845 tons of drilling waste, about 47% of its total tonnage for the year. Contained in that waste stream is naturally occurring radiation — radium 226 and 228 — from drilling and fracking a mile or more underground.

In May 2019, a Fayette County Common Pleas Court judge ordered the landfill, which produced up to 300,000 gallons a day of runoff, also called leachate, to stop piping it to the Belle Vernon municipal sewage treatment plant. The court said the runoff, because of its toxicity, was damaging the facility’s biologic treatment process, resulting in the discharge of poorly treated water into the Mon.

In February, the landfill agreed to pay a $24,000 fine for violations involving the improper disposal of shale gas drilling waste and contaminated liquids.

According to the DEP, the landfill has been trucking its leachate to disposal facilities in and out of state. In the first quarter of 2020, it trucked 6.36 million gallons to the Eastern Ohio Regional Wastewater Authority in Bellaire, Ohio, and the Westerly Waste Water Treatment Plant in Duncansville, Pa. In the second quarter, it disposed of 6.19 million gallons and in the third quarter, 3.44 million gallons, all at the Westerly Waste Water Treatment Plant.

The landfill owner has applied for a DEP permit to build a methane-burning filtration and evaporation system to address the runoff issue. But John Stolz, a professor at Duquesne University’s Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Microbiology, said such a system would send some pollutants into the air and result in concentrating chemicals and radioactivity in the leftover sludge.

“A system impacted by shale gas waste is a system that is both toxic and radioactive, and will get hotter over time,” said Mr. Stolz, who has measured elevated radiation in the landfill’s runoff.

“This is a significant situation.”

Ro Rozier, a spokeswoman for the landfill, said its owners are committed to the “highest environmental standards,” and that it manages landfill runoff in accordance with DEP regulations.

She said the landfill operators seek to mitigate roadway mud when they see it and rejected the accusation that it is “hazardous.”

“Recent and significant rain and snow prompted us to bolster existing infrastructure to ensure mitigation of these concerns going forward,” Ms. Rozier said.

But Ms. Fought said many of her neighbors want to see the landfill closed, and in June she collected 300 signatures opposed to the proposed evaporation facility and submitted them to the DEP during a public comment period on a permit for that project.

Lauren Fraley, a DEP spokeswoman, said the department has requested additional information from the landfill’s owner, and the evaporator permit is under review.

Ms. Fraley said compliance and enforcement actions against the landfill are ongoing.

“DEP understands the frustrations raised by residents and has required the landfill to take numerous short-, medium-, and long-term measures to improve operations, reduce the nuisances it creates, and become compliant with environmental regulations,” Ms Fraley said in an email response to questions.

In December, the DEP conducted six inspections at the landfill, she said. Those inspections showed the landfill was in violation of regulations prohibiting mud tracked onto public roads on Dec. 9, 23, 29 and 30.