Work on Chester Co. landfill fire nearing an end

Work began almost three months ago to extinguish the ongoing landfill fire in western Chester County, but for most residents around the Bennett Landfill site, it didn’t take nearly as long to see the effects.

For months, a fire inside the landfill had blanketed the area with a thick layer of smoke that health officials warned residents not to breathe. The Environmental Protection Agency eventually declared the area a public health hazard and released federal funding to help extinguish the blaze. The agency began work at the beginning of June.

“Three days after they got here, the smoke was gone,” said Gus Poulos, who owns the Broad River Mart on Pinckney Road, next to the entrance to the landfill where a subterranean fire has been burning since November.

Those who have seen the landfill change as crews worked to smother the fire say the progress has been impressive. Federal contractors have “compacted” an area the size of an acre, working to fill the fissures over a pile of debris burning in an underground cavern through which smoke containing noxious chemicals was escaping and being captured at air monitoring stations in the nearby town of Lockhart.

“You can see it’s all been cleared off,” said Lockhart Mayor Ailene Ashe, who estimates she’s visited the site five or six times since the EPA began work there. “The EPA and DHEC have done a terrific job.”

Now an end for the project is in sight. Work should be completed by the end of September, said Matthew Huyser, the EPA’s on-site coordinator.

A dozen contract workers with CMC Inc. of Nicholasville, Ky., have completed the “capping action” over the fire, Huyser said, creating a smooth surface of soil in the former dumping site that soon will be covered over with vegetative topsoil.

Regular updates on the project have been posted online to epaosc.org/bennettlandfill.

Now, workers are completing the “secondary objective” of burying exposed asbestos that, after being collected from around the 40-acre landfill, ultimately will fill up a 2-acre site. Workers also will clean up soil runoff in the landfill’s retention pond.

“What they’ve seen is the end of the removal action,” Huyser said. “Now we are installing the final remedies.”

The long burn

Multiple fire crews were called to the landfill when flames from the underground blaze – which emergency officials said could have been burning for much longer – burst onto the surface Nov. 2. For a week, engines from five different counties parked in front of Poulos’s store to battle the flames, eventually getting the fire under control, but they never managed to extinguish the fire below the surface.

For the next six months, heavy smoke would regularly accumulate over the town of Lockhart, directly across the Broad River from the landfill, trapped by the area’s low-lying topography. Air monitors were set up in front of the town hall and school, and by April had recorded unsafe levels of benzine and formaldehyde in the air. Residents started to complain of health problems they said were exacerbated by the haze.

“The smoke was terrible, especially in the morning and the evening,” Ashe said.

Ed Darby was on the scene during November’s round-the-clock fight with the erupting landfill fire. The deputy director of Chester County’s emergency management has seen a major improvement at the site since work began.

“It’s totally different,” Darby said. “They’ve done a great job of getting the debris buried... I’m real pleased with how it turned out.”

Readings gathered from air monitors show unsafe materials in the air have dropped off, and health officials have long since removed six monitoring devices operated by EPA and DHEC from locations around Lockhart. Only two weeks ago, Poulos had a monitor removed that had been planted in front of his family’s farmhouse since the fire began.

“They were still monitoring it, but nothing was showing up,” Poulos said.

Now, the only air monitor in the area is one directly behind the Broad River Mart that feeds data back to the EPA office in Atlanta. It is surrounded by a steel cage to protect it from vandals.

While monitors hadn’t recorded any dangerous fallout for months, Huyser said many had to be moved simply because they broke down after an extended period of time monitoring the long-burning fire.

“This was an extremely long time for these monitors to be running,” he said. “They were not designed to run for more than a few months, and the data we were receiving from them was clearly bad.”

Permanent solution

By the end of next month, workers hope to have the landfill in a condition the federal government can leave in place without the need for further oversight. But even after the crews leave, officials won’t be able to say for sure if the fire is out.

“With a subterranean fire, there’s usually a robust system of monitoring in place for months or years,” gathering data that will show if a noxious fire is still burning beneath the surface, Huyser said. “We’re not going to be around to do that.”

Instead, Huyser will recommend local officials continue to monitor the site, especially after major storms or construction activity in the area, anything that might disturb the compacted topsoil and potentially allow any more fumes to escape from the cavern.

If anything does happen, Darby and other emergency responders will be back at the Bennett Landfill. But from what he’s seen so far, he’s not too worried.

“I’m confident in the process they have to remedy the problem,” he said. “They’re real professional in what they do to take care of the problem.”

Once the asbestos problem at the landfill is handled, the EPA hopes to bury other debris workers have cleared from the site. But whether they can depends on how much money they have left over. Officials have estimated the months-long process will cost up to $2 million in taxpayer funds to complete, and the EPA’s regional office says more funding could be made available if necessary.

The agency hasn’t estimated how much money has been spent on the site so far, said James Pinkney, spokesman for the Southeastern EPA office, and operators have used the previously announced dollar amount as a “rough estimate” of what the total project will cost once all work is done.

At the state level, DHEC has pursued legal action against the landfill’s owner. Ronald Ray Olsen faces charges of violating South Carolina’s solid waste law and not maintaining proper cleanup money for Bennett and other landfills he operates.

But on the ground, locals are more concerned with seeing the disappearance of the smoke that long made life in the small town so anxious.

“From the ones I’ve talked to, everybody acts excited about it,” Ashe said. “It’s wonderful not to have the smoke or the smell here anymore.”

Likewise, Poulos says “everybody’s happy” since the “guys from Kentucky” showed up, many of whom regularly come into the Broad River Mart between shifts. The owner says they’ve offered to show him the progress they’ve made, but Poulos is afraid “I’d hit a hole and fall in.”

He recently expressed his concerns to some of the workers as they carried rolls of grass up the hill to lay over the site that once belched smoke out of the earth.

“I asked what happens to it if the smoke comes back,” Poulos said. “They said it’s not going to come back. They have confidence in themselves.”

This story was originally published August 23, 2015 at 3:59 PM with the headline "Work on Chester Co. landfill fire nearing an end."