Cause of landfill fires remains unknown

Glencoe Fire Chief Bob Scheidt said his department has been called to the Spruce Ridge Landfill seven times this year to extinguish fires.

The latest incident occurred Aug. 26, and Waste Management District Manager Mark Reinert said the fires started popping up in February.

The cause of the repeated blazes is not yet known, according to Scheidt. “It doesn’t look like any type of criminal activity now,” he said.

The fires have all occurred in the area where Spruce Ridge deposits building construction waste. None of the fires have been catastrophic, Scheidt said, because they’ve been spotted early.

“It’s more of a surface fire that is controllable,” he said, but added, “No fire is good.”

Silver Lake and Hutchinson fire departments have been called to help with water pumpers, because the landfill is in a rural area south of Biscay. Scheidt said Waste Management is conducting its own investigation into the cause of the repeat fires. “I can assure you they are working on it just as hard as we are,” he said.

Reinert confirmed the cause remains unknown, but he believes the matter has been resolved. He said “a certain type of waste” was a suspected factor, but declined to specify what the “suspect waste” was because it’s not certain if it was responsible.

Scheidt speculated the fires might have been caused by spontaneous combustion resulting from chemical reactions in the waste.

(Jorge Sosa is a staff writer for the Hutchinson Leader. He can be reached at sosa@hutchinsonleader.com)