By Ray Gronberg
The Herald-Sun (Durham, North Carolina)
Copyright 2006 The Durham Herald Co.
Workers began trying to snuff out a smoky fire Tuesday that has plagued neighbors of Durham’s yard-waste dump off East Club Boulevard for more than a week.
City officials predict the effort will take two weeks.
As a waste-grinding machine churned away, workers used earthmovers and a water truck to expose and douse burning debris. The effort got under way after officials took steps to ensure runoff from the burning debris pile wouldn’t reach nearby Ellerbee Creek, a tributary of the Eno River.
Hauling trucks arrived, were filled and left carrying mulch slated either for deposit in other yard-waste landfills in the region, or for use in city operations. Officials have vowed to remove every last bit of debris from the East Club site, which operated without a state license from July 2004 until last week when it stopped accepting new waste.
The beginning of the effort to extinguish the smoldering blaze was good news for neighbors who’ve complained of smoke and soot since the fire began Sept. 10.
“I don’t like breathing the stuff, I can tell you that,” said Betty Calder, who lives on Westminster Avenue, about a third of a mile east of the burning pile.
More smoke coming
Officials warned that firefighting efforts are bound to produce more smoke as earthmovers expose pockets of hot debris to fire-feeding oxygen. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said Jay Reinstein, the Solid Waste Management Department’s assistant director for business services.
Tuesday’s work marked a shift from the city government’s initial strategy of containing the fire.
City Manager Patrick Baker, who visited the site Tuesday to monitor operations, said the N.C. Division of Forest Services initially advised the city to let the fire burn, at least until it consumed some of the debris pile. There had been fears that an early attack on the blaze could risk the safety of the workers involved.
But by last Wednesday, officials had turned to planning an effort to put out the fire, in hopes of getting started early this week, Baker said, adding that concerns voiced by state regulators about potential water-pollution threats had complicated the process.
Tuesday’s effort didn’t come soon enough to blunt the complaints of residents or elected officials, who faulted Baker and his staff for the fire, for failing to keep the dump’s state license current and for not doing enough to keep the City Council and dump neighbors informed.
‘A disaster’
One critic, Davie Drive resident and Northeast Neighborhood Association President Jackie Brown, has told the council that “someone’s head needs to roll for this.”
Her view hadn’t changed as of Tuesday.
“As far as I’m concerned, this whole thing is a disaster,” Brown said. “It’s been a disaster waiting to happen for two years, and the manager wasn’t even aware of it. Nor were his bosses on the City Council.”
Brown’s unhappiness was echoed Tuesday by Mayor Bill Bell who, while stopping short of calling for dismissals, said “the community hasn’t been served well” by its government’s handling of the matter.
“Someone should be accountable for it, and someone should pay the price for taking the city through what we’re going through or the citizens through what they’re going through,” Bell said, adding that he expects Baker to address the situation again during Thursday’s council work session.
While he’s apologized for the city’s failure to get the dump’s license renewed, Baker has said he hadn’t known about the problem before the fire broke out. He said that the first document he saw highlighting the omission was a violation notice from state regulators last week that was copied to him.
Timing questioned
Other documents indicate that while regulators directed the bulk of their correspondence to city Waste Disposal & Recycling Manager Roosevelt Carter, they also added Baker to the carbon-copy list of a series of compliance audits of the facility starting in June.
Each of their reports from that date forward warned of problems at the dump, and one sent out on Sept. 6 said the N.C. Division of Waste Management, a part of the state Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, had launched enforcement actions against the city.
Asked about that, Baker on Tuesday said again that he hadn’t seen anything from the state before last week, and that he’d assumed the Solid Waste Management Department was handling the license process.
He said the dump’s status figured in one discussion he had with the department while he was still interim city manager, which suggests the discussion occurred in the latter part of 2004.
After that “I was not following up on whether we had the permit or didn’t, because I knew we were following with DENR on something, and I didn’t ask,” Baker said. “Once I was told we were working with the state, I assumed we were working with the state.”
Also on Tuesday, Reinstein conceded that city solid waste officials had attempted to handle much of the work involved in renewing the license in-house, rather than leaning on an outside consultant.
That appears certain to change, as during a meeting Monday, landfill managers from neighboring Orange County advised the city to find and ride an engineering firm with experience in navigating the state licensing process, Reinstein said.
A selection effort was under way. “We have a meeting with those folks today,” Reinstein said Tuesday.