He is operating a regional landfill for cash. I let that sit for a moment. Pernell, how much money? Conservatively, Roland's been moving 12 to 15 loads a week. Average tipping fee at a permitted class 3 is $140 per ton.
Roland charges 70. He moves about 300 tons a week, 21,000 a week, 91,000 a month, about $11 million over 22 months. Cash mostly, not declared. The IRS would also be interested. He paused.
There is more. I have water samples taken from Sourwood Creek downstream of the hollow. Lead, PCB, old paint, asbestous fiber. Every sample is over the EPA drinking water standard. I have samples from three separate months.
I have samples from before any rainstorm and samples from after to control for runoff. I have the chain of custody documentation that any federal prosecutor will need. There are three downstream wells in Hwood County drawing from the same shallow aquifer. Two of them belong to families with young children. EPA Region 4 has jurisdiction.
So does the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. So does Federal Rico. If we can prove a continuing criminal enterprise, which with $11 million in undeclared tipping fees, we can. I closed my eyes for a long moment. The trucks crossing my bridge had not just been damaging a 101-year-old Span.
They had been hauling poison. I asked Pernell the only question that still mattered. Pernell, how long have you been documenting this? Two years and four months, Mr. Carver. I had the evidence.
I just didn't have a plaintiff. You are my plaintiff. I picked up the phone and called Whitlock Trit. I asked him to add seven more agencies to my distribution list. The trap was no longer just going to stop trucks.
It was going to bring down an entire empire. The trap took 11 days to build. I spent the first 3 days in my barn with two engineering specialists I had pulled in from a Tennessee structural sensing company called Ridgeline Instruments. Their lead technician was a woman named Cordelia Hatchet, mid-50s, gray stre who had spent 20 years installing weigh-in motion systems on interstate way stations for state DOS. Her assistant was a kid named Jasper Whitlo, 26, an FAA part 107 licensed drone operator who had grown up in Bryson City and could fly a quadcopter through a doorway.