Almost every Hawaiian island has at least one landfill now on fire, and every Hawai\u2019i landfill except Hilo’s has been on fire within the last six years, according to the state Department of Health. However, a relatively small fire in a private landfill on Maui has ignited efforts to create what may be the first guidelines in the country for dealing with underground fires.<\/p>\n
Currently, no county has been required to extinguish fires at municipal landfills. How\u2013ever, the DOH is forming a working group to study their possible health effects. Of special concern are the longer-term fires, such as the one burning for some five years now in the now closed Kona landfill.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n On January 26, 1998, an employee at Richard DeCoite’s construction and demolition (C&D) landfill in Ma’alaea, Maui, noticed an odd odor, which led to the discovery of a fire 15 to 20 feet underground. Attempts were made to smother it with injections of more than 1,000 pounds of liquid carbon dioxide. The fire was eventually deemed to be extinguished in a matter of weeks, although it continued to smolder for four months.<\/p>\n The source of the blare was probably a palm tree from an area where brush had been cleared.<\/p>\n Municipal landfill fires are mostly caused by methane gas from decomposing organic matter. C&D landfills, on the other hand, contain items like rebar, concrete, lumber and cleared brush. Decomposition is not the prob\u2013lem; cleared brush is.<\/p>\n According to Jeff Darcy, environmental engineer in the Air Enforcement Office of the Environmental Protection Agency, Region IX, Hawai’i has less rigorous air quality stan\u2013dards because of its tradewinds, low popula\u2013tion density and isolation. Thus, when Maui developers or contractors clear brush, they are allowed to burn it before taking it to a landfill; this decreases the volume of their haul, and thus the amount they will be charged.<\/p>\n Any material that has been burned should, of course, be cooled before it is dumped. Ma’alaea’s landfill has two inspection sites to check for \u201chot loads.” One site is at the scales, where an employee looks at the load to check its origins and talks to the hauler. After the load is dumped, it is inspected again for heat or hazardous materials like paint, asbestos, or chemicals.<\/p>\n During the Ma\u2019alaea fire, temperature probes found the main hot spot to be a charred palm tree that had become a briquette. (The tree had the most ash surrounding it, signifying the most intense heat).<\/p>\n Because palms are spongy inside, they re\u2013tain heat for a long time. Both the person who dumped it as well as the landfill’s employees probably saw a tree that was cooled on the outside. Once in the dump, however, the heat inside the tree simmered and finally erupted in a blaze.<\/p>\n Living Downwind<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n The odor produced by the fire and subsequent efforts to put it out reportedly caused head\u2013aches, nausea, and swollen eyes for many residents living about a mile downwind of the landfill.<\/p>\n Tanya Every, a resident of Ma\u2019alaea for 15 years, said she sought emergency care for what was diagnosed as a sinus infection. In addition to medical expenses, she says she spent about $1,000 on an air conditioner so she could keep the odor from entering her home.<\/p>\n Ma\u2019alaea resident Alice Perry says the smell became so pervasive that every night in early February, she would be awakened with a choking sensation. She said the odor lasted into May, but grew more episodic as the fire began to be controlled.<\/p>\n By March 20, Maui County found the odors had been sufficiently reduced, so it allowed the dump to continue operating after giving the operator one week to control the odor. Charles Jencks, director of Maui County’s Public Works and Waste Manage\u2013ment Department, says the county monitored the site daily until the beginning of the sum\u2013mer, when the smell stopped. When asked to describe the odor, Jencks compared it to a household barbecue that had been doused with water.<\/p>\n Permit Problems<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n But even as the fire was being brought under control, DeCoite’s problems did not end. In the scrutiny of public anger, DeCoite was found to have been operating his landfill with\u2013out a valid special land-use permit since the previous one expired on September 30, 1997. The county gave him until May 12 to get the new permit from the Maui Planning Com\u2013mission.<\/p>\n On the day of the deadline, the commission denied DeCoite’s application for a new per\u2013mit. Instead, the commission had approved an \u201cintervention” in the case, allowing both the Ma\u2019alaea Community Association and the landfill operator to present evidence and argu\u2013ments in a formal hearing. (The intervention is now set to begin in November.)<\/p>\n Afterward, the county Planning Depart\u2013ment ordered the landfill closed.<\/p>\n Ongoing Concerns<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Most of the flammable substances in the Ma\u2019alaea landfill – Maui County’s only con\u2013struction-material landfill – are lumber prod\u2013ucts, which are often treated with such preser\u2013vatives as chromated copper arsenate (CCA).<\/p>\n Burning pressure-treated wood is illegal nationwide because of the carcinogenic and lethal dangers from inhaling, ingesting, or touching the ash. The heavy metals in CCA, when incinerated, become very concentrated in the remaining ash.<\/p>\n In a June 22 letter to John Harder, head of the Department of Health’s Solid Waste branch, Jack Mueller, chairman of the Ma\u2019alaea Community Association, wrote, \u201cOur community has been bartered by the noxious odors from the pit. When we filed our request for intervention with Maui County, we filed with it some fifty letters, e-mail, etc. from residents who had suffered health prob\u2013lems, inconvenience, and financial losses, and in addition, a petition with 1000+- signatures asking for the closing of the pit.”<\/p>\n He went on to say that, \u201cin almost every one of these letters, the writers stated that one of their symptoms was persistent headaches. In reading the affects of airborne arsenic poi\u2013soning this [headache] is one of the first symptoms.<\/p>\n However, CCA ash is very heavy, rarely rising into the air, particularly when it is trapped in an earthen oven.<\/p>\n This may explain why, when engineers from DOH took air samples from the landfill and from the air around the Ma\u2019alaea condo\u2013miniums, they did not find any detectable arsenic, chromium, or other health risks.<\/p>\n Testing<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Darcy, the air quality engineer with the EPA, became involved on March 9, after he was called by a Ma\u2019alaea resident. Darcy in turn called Harder. Darcy says his office has no regulations regarding landfill fires, so he called Hawai\u2019i to see whose jurisdiction it would come under: that of Maui County, or the DOH, which is in charge of regulating land\u2013fills.<\/p>\n \u201cThis may have been the impetus for the state to do the air sampling,” Darcy said. \u201cI don’t know. My role was to get the people talking and let them resolve it.”<\/p>\n On March 19 and 20, DOH’s Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response (HEER) toxicologist Jon Pierre Michaud and DOH Solid and Hazardous Waste engineer Gary Siu took air samples during the day from the rim of the landfill as well as in the pit itself. During the night, when residents said the odor was the worst, they sampled the air from a Ma\u2019alaea condo. The samples were then analyzed for the presence of more than 100 compounds.<\/p>\n Residents thought the delay between their original complaints in February and testing was far too long, but Harder says they ran the tests as soon as they obtained permits and funds to rent the testing equipment from the mainland. He estimates they ran the test two weeks after the peak of the fire (officially extinguished in February, as noted by lower core temperatures), while it was still smolder\u2013ing at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n \u201cWe responded to the community’s con\u2013cerns,\u201d Michaud says, \u201cbut we have to base our decisions on what we actually find when we go out and measure.\u201d<\/p>\n They did not find much.<\/p>\n The results from the pit (at the corner of Honoapi\u2019lani Highway and North Kihei Road) showed most of the air particulates were from dust, not smoke. Concentrations of all the substances tested for, including sulfurs, volatile organic carbons, arsenic and carbon monoxide, were well below health guidelines.<\/p>\n Samples taken from the condominium area were much the same. Siu and Michaud’s report notes that the monitors at the condos were placed on a back balcony of the unit closest to the landfill and on the roof of a condo that was second closest to the pit, but a story higher and above most ground-level contaminants.<\/p>\n \u201cWe would never deny that people are having symptoms, but we would try to figure out what is causing them,” Michaud said. He and Siu found other nearby sources of particu\u2013lates, including the cane fields, the MECO Ma\u2019alaea power station and the Kealia pond and wetlands (which, in dry weather, are a source of dust).<\/p>\n In early September, Siu and Michaud re\u2013turned to Maui to conduct further tests at Ma\u2019alaea and at other sites where landfill fires are suspected. \u201cSo far as we could tell,” Michaud told Environment Hawai`i, \u201cwe do not perceive any hazards. The situation has abated, but we would like to analyze the data [consultant] Steve Joseph has collected to make sure the fire is indeed out.”<\/p>\n <div align="center""A Broader view<\/div>\n <\/b><\/p>\n Harder says the Ma\u2019alaea fire and resulting outcry has caused his agency \u201cto look a little bit differently at landfills.” He says several data\u2013base searches were run and meetings were held with the EPA and counterparts in other states, but little information on controlling the fires was available when the Ma\u2019alaea landfill fire broke out.<\/p>\n Darcy says he, too, tried to gather informa\u2013tion on regulations and methods for control\u2013ling landfill fires for health risks, but could find next to nothing.<\/p>\n Steve Joseph, a landfill consultant, is hop\u2013ing to help the state devise some general strategies through the working group that the DOH is setting up. He said the possibility is high for doing something innovative and comprehensive about landfill fires.<\/p>\n Joseph, employed by Masa Fujioka & Associates of O\u2019ahu and retained through them by the operator of the Ma\u2019alaea landfill, says he thinks little has been researched or written about landfill fires because no operator wants to admit to having a fire on site. Also, he says, since they are so common, and so expensive to put out, many operators try to ignore them, hoping they’ll go out on their own.<\/p>\n The DOH’s Michaud is also involved in the working group, as is Siu of the DOH Office of Solid Waste Management; in Sep\u2013tember, Michaud left the DOH to begin work at the University of Hawai\u2019i, but he is hoping to continue his involvement. He would like to look at present landfill fires; test what, if anything, is emitted; learn how to control contaminants; discover what causes ignitions; and develop efficient methods to extinguish the fires.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’d like to get a better picture and get onto it earlier,” he says. \u201cBut it’s not like there are standard cookbook operations. You have to go and figure it out case by case.”<\/p>\n Harder said the Ma\u2019alaea site continues to be monitored with temperature probes and liquid carbon dioxide available to spray im\u2013mediately on any hot spots. However, he says, as for his office, the fire incident is closed. \u201cThis is one of the better fire responses we’ve seen,” he adds.<\/p>\n Michaud agrees. \u201cThe operator has made a tremendous effort to do everything right,” he says.<\/p>\n Volume 9, Number 4 October 1998<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost every Hawaiian island has at least one landfill now on fire, and every Hawai’i landfill except Hilo’s has been on fire within the last six years, according to the state Department of Health. 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