By Max Blau Carolyn Dorondo couldn’t escape the smell of garbage. There were days last year when she couldn’t go outside due to the smell. Some nights, the stench wafted into her Ball Ground home, awakening her from a restful sleep. The odor grew so foul that Dorondo, along with other residents of Cherokee County, filed complaints with environmental regulators. “The stench in our air was ruining our daily lives,” Dorondo said. Less than a mile from Dorondo’s home, the operators of the Pine Bluff Landfill were facing a crisis in the middle of the 914-acre dump that was largely hidden from neighbors’ view. What was once a small crack in the middle of the landfill had widened into a 1,000-foot-long ravine last September. Odors from exposed waste spread for miles, into posh subdivisions and over family farms. Uncontrolled leachate — liquid formed when water mixes with decomposing waste — flowed out of the landfill site into a nearby creek. The damage from the crack broke the company’s equipment that was designed to monitor how much toxic gas was in the air. Hundreds of pages of records obtained by Georgia Health News reveal the extent of the violations at the Pine Bluff landfill for the first time. An expert on the industry, who requested anonymity, reviewed the documents obtained by GHN about the violations, and called the series of collapses at the site “the worst thing I’ve ever read short of an entire landfill being shut down.” One state official, Kenneth Phillips…