2018 wildfire season: more on post-fire clean-up

I have recently written about the post-fire hazardous waste and debris removal following the Camp Fire in Butte County, the Woolsey Fire (Ventura and Los Angeles County) and the Hill Fire in Ventura County which burned close to the Woolsey Fire ( see my February 27th article which includes links to earlier articles). According to the CAL Fire incident database, structures destroyed in each fire are as follows:

Hill Fire: 4 buildings destroyed.
Woolsey Fire: 1,643 destroyed and 341 damaged.
Camp Fire: 18,804 buildings destroyed.

I know about the magnitude of the Camp Fire clean-up, I also know that disasters that destroy a large number of properties such as tornadoes, massive flooding, hurricanes have the potential to at least put a strain on local landfill capacity. At the same time, I know from my work on earlier articles about the 2019 post-fire clean-ups that each of the affected counties have put in a lot of work in planning their respective clean-ups including finding landfills that can take both hazardous and non-hazardous debris as well as ash. I also understand that some debris, e.g. concrete and metal, will be recycled. With all this in mind, I did a search on the internet earlier today and found a January 10,  2019 article, updated on January 29th from the Sacramento Bee reporting on some challenges facing local and state officials involved in the Camp Fire clean-up. This article reports that the recycling of concrete and metal is controversial because near-by Chico residents are understandably hesitant about plans to have a scrapyard in their town (in addition, see my January 11th article). As I write this article, I don't know where this scrapyard is located.

I was interested in a second challenge cited in the Sacramento Bee article, a controversy involving one of the subsidiaries of the contractor awarded the soil testing contract,  two employees plead guilty to faking soil tests on an earlier project and sentenced to prison. The company, Tetra Tech said that they were rogue employees and have addressed the problems. CalRecycle, one of the California agencies involved in the post-fire clean-up said:

CalRecycle officials said Thursday Tetra Tech was the lowest responsible bidder for the contract and that the state has confidence in the company’s work. 

“In previous wildfire debris removal operations, Tetra Tech has proven to be a reliable debris management contractor, meeting CalRecycle’s high standards for health and safety, performance, and operational accountability,” spokesman Lance Klug said in an email to The Bee.

Klug said CalRecycle has, however, implemented a new auditing process as an additional layer of oversight on current and future projects, in part because of the large size of the Camp Fire contracts. 

“All CalRecycle-managed wildfire debris removal operations are conducted with strict contractor oversight measures to protect the health of wildfire survivors, communities, and all workers involved in debris removal efforts, in addition to internal auditing systems to ensure operational accountability,” Klug wrote.

Hopefully Tetra Tech has corrected the problems and updated their procedures so that employee fraud won't happen again and that CalRecycles new audit procedures will address potential problems in the clean-up so that they can be corrected before the clean-up is completed.

The third challenge that I read about in the Sacramento Bee article concerns the question that I had: Where will the debris from the Camp Fire go? Apparently, local officials have identified three landfills that  will accept Camp Fire debris (with requisite permits). There is a nice map locating likely and possible landfills that could take Camp Fire debris. According to the Sacramento Bee:

The massive cleanup prompts other longer-term concerns. If wildfires continue to happen, are California landfills at risk of being over taxed? . . . 

Waste Management, one of the biggest haulers and landfill operators in the country, owns the Anderson landfill near Red Bluff, which just finished taking most of the Carr Fire debris and is now prepping new space for the Camp Fire. Ken Lewis, an executive with the company, says its Anderson landfill has about 60 years of capacity left. But the Camp Fire debris alone could shorten that lifespan by five years. Still, he said, he’s lobbying for the Camp Fire waste to come to his door.

Is California's landfill capacity adequate to take the waste from the 2018 wildfires, especially debris from the Camp Fire? I hope so. I know from all of my reading that the local and state officials have worked hard on the planning for the post-fire clean-up but not limited to identifying landfills that will accept the waste. I am cautiously hopeful that there is enough landfill capacity to take debris from these three wildfires, but you never know. For good or bad, time will tell. Looking to the future, since debris from each large wildfire can shorten the lifespan of a landfill, what will happen if these mega-fires in California continue?

I have only been writing about mega-wildfires in California. Mega wildfires can occur anywhere so other states and countries may well face the issue of adequate landfill capacity sometime down the road.