Jerry Needham
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 2007 San Antonio Express-News
All Rights Reserved
HELOTES, Texas — Fire crews battling the huge debris pile that’s been smoking up the air near Helotes since Christmas should have it snuffed within two weeks, an official with the state’s environmental agency said Tuesday.
“Approximately 25 percent of the fire has been extinguished,” said Kelly Cook, Texas homeland security coordinator and commander of the emergency response team that took control of the smoldering mound seven weeks ago.
Tuesday was the seventh day that crews hired by Cook’s agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, were able to work on the blaze since resuming efforts last week. Firefighting efforts had been temporarily halted Jan. 17 when fire residues in nearby water wells showed a different strategy was needed to avoid aquifer contamination.
“It’s going really well,” Cook said of work on the 700-foot-long, 80-foot-tall pile of wood chips, dirt, brush and logs. “They’re fighting the fire like you wouldn’t believe. Everything’s working the way they told us it would. You can see a significant reduction in the size of the pile. We’re fighting the fire both on top and all along the east side.
“We were actually able to get a bulldozer up on top of the fire” Monday, he said. “We’re looking at about two weeks to get the fire out if everything goes well.”
The 18 contract workers from Oil Mop LLC and Williams Fire and Hazard Control Inc. are pushing the burning material into a clay-lined sluice and quench pit adjacent to the pile.
The thick layer of clay is designed to keep water from leaking into the Edwards Aquifer, the water supply for 1.7 million people in the region.
The crews are limiting the amount of water sprayed on the pile itself, which sits on the aquifer’s recharge zone. They’re spraying only enough on the pile to keep equipment and workers cool.
“It’s working great,” Cook said. “You can see the water run right off the pile down into the pit, and they’re working that material down there.”
Cook said the water has been collecting in the huge clay-lined quench pit.
The state agency and the Edwards Aquifer Authority are taking samples from up to 29 wells around the pile each day to check for any sign that firefighting water is migrating into the aquifer, he said.
SAWS also is checking wells, spokeswoman Anne Hayden said.
“We are continuing to monitor wells and, at this point, I don’t have any information of any changes in water quality,” she said.
Cook said that cleansed water from the quench pit soon will begin to be discharged into nearby Helotes Creek.
“We’ve got the water treatment system up and running,” he said. “We’ve tried to recycle and reuse it as much as we can. We’re able to recycle a lot of that water and draw in a little less fresh water. We reuse it in the pit and the sluice. We don’t reuse any of the treated water on the pile.”
The water treatment system is a series of sand and charcoal filters that will “take everything out of the water that’s been put in there as a result of the fire,” Cook said.
He said he gave authorization Tuesday to construct a storage area for the extinguished material in a field west of the pile.
“We’ll put down a poly liner and some berm barriers and move some of that cold material into this lined area by dump truck and then cover that up at the end of each day so it’s protected from rain and any type of runoff,” Cook said.