A months-long landfill fire in Alabama reveals waste regulation gaps
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WBHM
Krissy Harmon's home is less than a mile from a landfill that caught fire more than three months ago. She uses blue painter's tape to keep smoke out and says her family still experiences health issues brought on by the fire.
The smell started seeping into Krissy Harmon's home late at night the weekend after Thanksgiving.
"I actually thought the house was on fire," Harmon recalled.
The acrid burning smell wasn't coming from Harmon's home. A nearby landfill in St. Clair County, Ala., had just ignited and it wouldn't stop burning for months.
The landfill, which makes up more than 13 acres, initially sent flames above the tree line and blanketed the area in smoke. Daniel Cash, who lives down the street from the landfill, said the smoke and flames had spread so high that a colorful haze filled the sky.
"It looked like a sunset from the colors of the fire and the smoke in the air and the vast area of it," Cash recalled
as he prepared for his shift at the nearby Waffle House.
For almost two months after that night, homes near the landfill were inundated with smoke and fumes. Some days, depending on the wind's direction, people 20 miles away in Birmingham reported smelling the emissions.
It's not known how the fire started at the privately owned landfill, which operates under the name Environmental Landfill Inc. Early on, local firefighters and the Alabama Forestry Commission tried to squelch the flames, but they were unsuccessful because the fire was largely underground.
Smoke billowed out of the mounds of buried waste for weeks as state and local authorities struggled to figure out who had jurisdiction to put out the fire, eventually calling on the Environmental Protection Agency. Now neighbors and local climate advocates are left asking why the site was never regulated, if the fire could have been prevented and how to keep a similar disaster from happening again. These concerns led state and local leaders to form a working group this month to assess their response.
The EPA says it doesn't track landfill fires, but according to the U.S. Fire Administration, this is just one of the tens of thousands of landfill fires, compacted-trash fires and dumpster fires that happen every year around the United States.
An unregulated hazard
Environmental Landfill was supposed to take in only downed trees, stumps and other natural materials what's known as vegetative waste. But a decade's worth of records from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) shows the business took other trash, including treated power poles, scrap metal, tires, appliances and other waste that should have been regulated. Some of that trash was buried among the vegetative waste when the fire started. During many of the agency's visits, inspectors noted that the site was a fire hazard. The landfill's operator declined to comment for this story.
ADEM maintains that the fire is primarily fueled by wood and other natural debris. Neighbors, however, say they've smelled fumes they know aren't from trees and tree limbs.
Frank Read stayed in his home across from the landfill and spent hundreds of dollars on air purifiers and filters to mitigate the fumes. He said he could smell the different types of materials as they smoldered.
"It depends on what's burning at the time," Read said. "There's times where it smells straight like wood, and then there's other times where you know tires are burning. You can smell the rubber. And then there's times when there's like a chemical smell. ... And that's what's scary."
Other than leaving home to go to his job at a tank-cleaning business, Read said it was impossible to spend time outdoors.
"You couldn't be outside for 15 minutes without being choked out," Read said.
Zoe McDonald / WBHM
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WBHM
Andrea Vehlow and Daniel Cash live just down the hill from Environmental Landfill. The landfill, which handles vegetative waste, caught fire in late November and has been burning ever since.
Some people in the small community near the site fled their homes, staying in hotels or rental properties miles away. Krissy Harmon, however, couldn't leave.
"We have a disabled child. We can't really take him just anywhere," said Harmon, who founded a nonprofit focused on serving people with autism.
Harmon's family spent insurance money on air purifiers and scrubbers, and they have lined their windows and doors with blue painter's tape, but they have still suffered health effects.
Harmon's 13-year-old son, who has severe autism and a rare genetic disorder, can't communicate if he's experiencing symptoms of smoke inhalation. That adds to Harmon's stress.
Harmon, who is immunocompromised, said she has had trouble sleeping, along with experiencing headaches, nosebleeds and other painful symptoms.
"It makes me feel like my throat is on fire at times. Like if you've ever had strep, and it feels like razor blades cutting," she said.
Read and Cash have had similar symptoms, including coughing, chest pains and dizziness.
In a late December news release, ADEM advised residents to stay inside and talk to their doctor if they were experiencing health issues because of the smoke.
People in the affected communities asked local politicians for help for weeks, but their pleas went unanswered as county and state officials went back and forth about who had the authority and the funds to put out the fire.
From the beginning, ADEM continued to remind people that it doesn't fight fires; nor does it have any regulatory responsibility over vegetative waste. The agency eventually said the St. Clair County Commission would need to put out the fire, but officials with the county said they didn't have the authority to enter the private property. It wasn't until Gov. Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency the same day the EPA stepped in that the county could use public funds on the property.
Lance LeFleur, ADEM's director, said the weekslong delay was impossible to sidestep.
"It's taken longer than anybody would have liked for it to take, but we had to go through the process of the state and local community examining and exhausting all of its options before bringing EPA in," he said.
Read said he and his neighbors were frustrated about the lack of response.
"The fire starts Sunday. I didn't expect it to be out by Tuesday. I don't think any resident did," Read said. "What frustrated us is that it took them five weeks to decide who was going to be in charge of it. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of."
On Jan. 4, more than a month after the fire started, ADEM asked the EPA to sample air at the site. The results showed synthetic compounds like trichloroethylene and Freon in the smoke, as well as high levels of cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene at homes near the landfill.
The heightened levels of some chemicals authorized the EPA to respond in mid-January. The landfill has been on fire for more than three months.
The regulatory gap
ADEM, the Alabama agency that regulates the state's landfills, doesn't consider environmental waste to be s
Sunday, March 12, 2023 at 10:30 am