A Publicly-Owned Landfill in Alabama Caught Fire and Smoldered for 50 Days.

NEW MARKET, Ala.—Merri Gardunia thought her house might be on fire. 

Gardunia, a special education teacher, was on her way home in August 2023 when she saw the smoke billowing above her road in New Market, Alabama, a small town just northeast of Huntsville. 

As she got closer, she sighed in relief. It wasn’t her house. It was the landfill next door. She’d never seen smoke at the site before, but she didn’t think too much of it, she told Inside Climate News. That was before she began waking up with migraines. She’d had headaches before the fire, Gardunia said, but nothing like these. 

Last week, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management announced it would fine Madison County $5,000 for an open burn the state regulator deemed as a “serious violation” of environmental regulations. The fire at the county-owned landfill, ignited by a spark from an on-site incinerator, according to landfill workers, smoldered for 50 days, into October, after local firefighters did what they could to put out the blaze. 

Tom Brandon, the county commissioner who represents the district where the landfill fire burned, told Inside Climate News that the fire has been “made into a bigger deal than it was.”

Gardunia disagreed. Even if the fire was accidental, she said, public officials should have done more to notify the public.

“They put everybody’s health at risk,” she said. “There are rules for a reason. I don’t take environmental guidelines lightly. They need to abide by them.”

The blaze in New Market began on August 22, according to a response to state officials from a representative of the Madison County landfill. 

A stray ember from an onsite incinerator sparked the fire, an onsite worker later told regulators, and the flames took hold in a nearby pile of vegetative debris. 

A day later, first responders with the New Market Volunteer Fire Department posted a video of personnel dousing the blaze with a firehose as thick smoke billowed from a pile of debris at least a dozen feet high. Another department, Hazel Green Volunteer Fire Department, helped with the response, according to the social media post.

Open burning is prohibited at landfills like the Madison County Landfill Number One because of the risk the fires could be difficult to contain or extinguish.

In recent years, Alabamians have become all too familiar with such risks. In November 2022, an underground blaze began at the Environmental Landfill northeast of Birmingham, near Moody. For months following, the subterranean fire covered dozens of acres near Moody, its burning material reaching more than 150 feet deep. 

The fire and resulting smoke left residents suffering from health impacts and schools limiting outside activity. All the while, state and local officials pointed fingers as to who should be responsible for dousing the flames. Only after federal officials stepped in was the fire quelled and covered.

The fire in New Market was not comparable in scale to that in Moody, which burned across a much larger and deeper area of land, but what happened in the Huntsville suburb demonstrated the looming threat posed by uncontrolled burns. In New Market, despite the fire’s relatively small footprint, firefighters were unable to completely extinguish it. Instead, according to state regulators, the fire would not be snuffed until October 9, a full 50 days after landfill workers said the blaze had begun. 

Tom Brandon, the county commissioner who represents the district where the landfill is located, said that “all agencies were notified” of the blaze when it sparked, but regulators with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) wrote in a proposed consent order that the state agency was not made aware of the fire until an inspector visited the site on September 6 and observed the burning woodpile himself. 

During that inspection, an incinerator operator told an ADEM staffer that the blaze had begun a week prior. A landfill representative would later admit that at the time of the inspection, the fire had already been burning for 15 days. 

Brandon said, however, that he doesn’t believe residents should be concerned about the blaze. 

“It’s been made a bigger deal than what it was,” Brandon said in an interview with Inside Climate News. “It wasn’t no more than just a brush fire that was self-contained in a small area.”

ADEM officials, though, wrote that the agency considered the open burn a “serious violation” of state environmental regulations, though it only fined the facility $5,000 for 50 violations—one for each day the blaze…