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. 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.
Currently, no county has been required to extinguish fires at municipal landfills. How–ever, 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.
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.
The source of the blare was probably a palm tree from an area where brush had been cleared.
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–lem; cleared brush is.
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–dards because of its tradewinds, low popula–tion 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.
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 “hot 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.
During the Ma’alaea 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).
Because palms are spongy inside, they re–tain 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.
Living Downwind
The odor produced by the fire and subsequent efforts to put it out reportedly caused head–aches, nausea, and swollen eyes for many residents living about a mile downwind of the landfill.
Tanya Every, a resident of Ma’alaea 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.
Ma’alaea 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.
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–ment Department, says the county monitored the site daily until the beginning of the sum–mer, when the smell stopped. When asked to describe the odor, Jencks compared it to a household barbecue that had been doused with water.
Permit Problems
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–out 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–mission.
On the day of the deadline, the commission denied DeCoite’s application for a new per–mit. Instead, the commission had approved an “intervention” in the case, allowing both the Ma’alaea Community Association and the landfill operator to present evidence and argu–ments in a formal hearing. (The intervention is now set to begin in November.)
Afterward, the county Planning Depart–ment ordered the landfill closed.
Ongoing Concerns
Most of the flammable substances in the Ma’alaea landfill – Maui County’s only con–struction-material landfill – are lumber prod–ucts, which are often treated with such preser–vatives as chromated copper arsenate (CCA).
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.
In a June 22 letter to John Harder, head of the Department of Health’s Solid Waste branch, Jack Mueller, chairman of the Ma’alaea Community Association, wrote, “Our 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–lems, inconvenience, and financial losses, and in addition, a petition with 1000+- signatures asking for the closing of the pit.”
He went on to say that, “in 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–soning this [headache] is one of the first symptoms.
However, CCA ash is very heavy, rarely rising into the air, particularly when it is trapped in an earthen oven.
This may explain why, when engineers from DOH took air samples from the landfill and from the air around the Ma’alaea condo–miniums, they did not find any detectable arsenic, chromium, or other health risks.
Testing
Darcy, the air quality engineer with the EPA, became involved on March 9, after he was called by a Ma’alaea resident. Darcy in turn called Harder. Darcy says his office has no regulations regarding landfill fires, so he called Hawai’i to see whose jurisdiction it would come under: that of Maui County, or the DOH, which is in charge of regulating land–fills.
“This may have been the impetus for the state to do the air sampling,” Darcy said. “I don’t know. My role was to get the people talking and let them resolve it.”
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’alaea condo. The samples were then analyzed for the presence of more than 100 compounds.
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–ing at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We responded to the community’s con–cerns,” Michaud says, “but we have to base our decisions on what we actually find when we go out and measure.”
They did not find much.
The results from the pit (at the corner of Honoapi’lani 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.
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.
“We 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–lates, including the cane fields, the MECO Ma’alaea power station and the Kealia pond and wetlands (which, in dry weather, are a source of dust).
In early September, Siu and Michaud re–turned to Maui to conduct further tests at Ma’alaea and at other sites where landfill fires are suspected. “So far as we could tell,” Michaud told Environment Hawai`i, “we 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.”
<div align="center""A Broader view
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