Noxious smoke

Noxious smoke
Better plan should have been in place for fires at Montezuma County landfill

June 19, 2001

Smoke from the stubborn fire at the landfill south of Cortez was visible throughout most of Montezuma County over the weekend. Even worse, the pervasive smoke was toxic.

The county health department has advised children and people with respiratory illnesses to stay inside and urged everyone else to avoid the smoke as much as possible. Cortez residents who spent any part of their weekends working in their yards or barbecuing a Father’s Day meal will vouch for the logic that warning. Visitors who came to the Southwest for fresh air, blue skies and long views have steered their RVs elsewhere. This fire will have a direct economic impact.

Part of the problem was that when the fire first started on Saturday, no one knew quite what to do about it. Initially, the fire department poured tens of thousands of gallons of water onto the flames, only to discover lately that drenching it where it stood probably wasn’t the best tactic because it may have rendered more trash accessible to the flames. The next idea was to smother it with dirt, but that proved impractical because of the size of the fuel supply, and experts from the Denver landfill pointed out that might cause the fire to burn underground for years. The current plan is to isolate the flammable materials so that the fire doesn’t spread, and then pull them apart so the fire can be extinguished. That’s a dangerous business.

Meanwhile, though, the fire continues to burn, and it’s anyone’s guess what’s fueling the flames. Even common household waste emits noxious chemicals when burned, and it’s not difficult to believe that far worse things have found their way into landfill — and now, into the atmosphere.

Americans have been allowed to believe that once their garbage is out of sight, it’s someone else’s problem. Modern methods of disposal have been designed to keep our waste from ever coming back to haunt us. Despite our best efforts, though, yesterday’s garbage is now a poisonous pall over the landscape, and it may hang for quite some time.

The amount of flammable material that goes into any landfill, and the combination of substances that might contribute to spontaneous combustion, it’s no surprise that fire occasionally breaks out. What is surprising is that there was no plan for dealing with one. The potential health hazards should have been apparent and are now obvious. There is considerable risk to county personnel who must now pull apart bales of trash after the fire has been allowed to burn out of control.

This situation might not have been preventable, but it was certainly foreseeable. Better planning should have been in place.