Landfill Fires: Their Magnitude, Characteristics and Mitigation

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Executive Summary

Landfills can be controversial in and of themselves. Homeowners and business owners tend not to support the siting and development of landfills in their neighborhoods due to perceived notions about noxious fumes, health and environmental effects, and adverse influences on property values. Fires occurring in landfill sites are an ongoing, complex problem that has existed for decades.

Although relatively uncommon, fires in landfills generally receive substantial media attention and have the potential to become politically damaging events. Landfill fires threaten the environment through toxic pollutants emitted into the air, water, and soil. Landfill fires are particularly challenging to the fire service. A large landfill fire normally requires numerous personnel and a significant period of time before it is contained. Both of these circumstances can strain a jurisdiction, particularly one dependent on volunteer staffing.

Landfill operators, members of the fire service, and community residents need to learn as much as possible from past experience to prevent and mitigate future landfill fires.

REGULATION. In 1976, Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to control hazardous waste from "cradle-to-grave." RCRA covers the generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste and provides a framework for the management of non-hazardous wastes. A turning point in landfill regulation and remediation occurred in 1980, first with the "Superfund" legislation, followed by the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments (HSWA) in 1984, which finally gave the EPA regulatory authority over landfills. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), known as Super-fund, governs closed and abandoned hazardous material waste sites, provides for the liability of persons responsible for the release of hazardous materials at these sites, and established a trust fund to provide for cleanup where no responsible party could be identified.

CHARACTERISTICS. The most common type of landfill is one that is designed to accept municipal solid waste (MSW). Other types of landfills include hazardous materials landfills, construction and demolition landfills, and industrial landfills. Each type of landfill has specific characteristics based on the type of waste it is designed to accept. The passage of liquid through solid waste in a landfill creates leachate, which contains potentially dangerous pollutants. As such, landfills must operate in a manner that protects the environment, particularly surface and ground waters, from leachate contamination. To do this, landfill designs generally incorporate a composite liner and a leachate collection system, and landfill procedures require that the waste collected each day be completely covered.

Because of the methods normally adopted to deposit, compact, and cover waste in land-fills, the decomposition of waste is largely anaerobic, which results in the production of large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide. Landfills are the largest source of methane emissions in the United States; in 1999, 35 percent of methane emissions were from landfills. Methane is highly flammable and plays a large role in the ignition of landfill fires.

EXTINGUISHING LANDFILL FIRES. The different dynamics, characteristics, and regulations of landfills and the fires that occur in them suggest that firefighting tactics need to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the materials buried in the landfill, which materials have ignited, depth of the fire, and the fire's ignition source. Challenges explored in this report include wind/weather; water supply; multi-agency response; personnel safety; access to, access by and maneuverability of heavy equipment; logistics; environmental impact; and landfill contents (potentially hazardous or illegal).

PREVENTION. Fire prevention actions can reduce property damage and the risk of in-jury and death, as well as decrease health and environmental hazards associated with landfill fires. As a rule, the cost of prevention is less expensive than the cost of fighting and cleaning up a fire. In many cases, particularly at larger landfills, fire prevention activities are mandated by law. The principal methods for landfill fire prevention include effective landfill management and appropriate methane gas detection and collection.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS. Data from the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) does not include MSW landfills as a fixed property use category. Rather, the NFIRS data set includes a category for "dump or sanitary landfill" under NFIRS Fixed Property Use code 932. Although this definition is broader than the definition of a landfill, it is the closest match available in NFIRS. Based on extrapolation of the NFIRS data, each year in the United States an average of 8,400 dump and landfill fires are reported to the fire service. This represents less than a half percent of all reported fires. Undoubtedly, some landfill fires go unreported because they burned undetected or were on private property and extinguished by the landfill operator. Reported fires are responsible for less than 10 civilian injuries, 30 firefighter injuries, and between $3 and $8 million in property loss each year.1 Deaths (civilian or fire service) are rare in these fires. Since NFIRS represents a sample of data, it may be that fatalities occurred during the study period and were not reported or captured in the data.

CASE STUDIES. A sample of landfill fires throughout the world sheds light on the land-fill fire problem. Waste disposal practices and the regulation of landfill sites are similar in the comparison countries. Landfill fires have been investigated and studied in more detail in these jurisdictions than in the United States. In addition to presenting U.S. case studies, this report includes brief synopses of interviews and media reports detailing landfill fires in the United States and the lessons that were learned from them.