Investigator, state agency ‘just don’t know’ if ‘junkyard property’ razed by wildfire had hazardous wastes
Local and state officials say they don’t have the capacity to address possible contamination from a fire that burned hazardous waste and materials on a Salcha-area property earlier this summer.
Salcha Fire and Rescue Chief Darrel VanderWeg says his firefighters had to carefully work around the structure fire just south of the Eielson Air Force Base boundary last June, because it was burning containers of hazardous waste that were among other junk on the property.
“There was a lot of trash and gas cans, propane bottles and -- there’s all sorts of stuff in there,” VanderWeg said. “I mean, I can’t identify most of the stuff that was burning.”
The 1.2-acre fire sent billows of black smoke into the air on June 28th, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to impose a temporary flight restriction above the property at milepost 344 of the Richardson Highway. Golden Valley Electric Association sent a crew, because the wildfire was burning in the power line right of way. And Division of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesperson Lily Coyle said that agency also responded.
“We had air resources, and we had multiple firefighters and on-the-ground crews responding,” she said.
The firefighters contained the Piledriver Slough Fire the next day, and no one was injured. But an investigator working on a report about the fire still worries about the hazardous materials.
“There were plastics and tires and cans and some barrels and stuff. I had no idea what was in them,” says Ernie Misewicz, a Salcha Fire battalion chief and forensic fire investigator. “They could’ve been empty. They could’ve had fuel in them. We just don’t know.”
The state Department of Environmental Conservation also doesn’t know. Spokesperson Kelly Rawalt said any hazardous materials that may have been on site all burned up, along with the junk and three structures that were on the vacant property. But she says DEC can’t say for sure, because the agency doesn’t have staff that specializes in those kinds of waste.
“I don’t think it is necessarily something in DEC’s purview,” she said, “because we don’t have an official hazardous waste program.”
Alaska is one of two states that don’t have a hazardous waste program, the other being Iowa, but instead rely on the federal Environmental Protection Agency to handle the wastes. Although the Legislature and Gov. Dunleavy agreed this year to create an EPA-approved program.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough doesn’t regulate hazardous waste, but its planning department staff is very familiar with the parcel.
“Oh, we’ve inspected this property numerous times,” says Kellen Spillman, the borough’s community planning director. “We’ve been out to the property at least 10 times in the last couple of years.”
But Spillman says he can’t do anything about the mess, one of about 230 unresolved junkyard properties in the borough, because he has no code-enforcement officers to inspect them.
“We’re recruiting locally, nationally, anywhere we can think of,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “In the meantime, it has been a little bit tough to try and keep up on these open cases.”
Spillman says the property owners need help to clean up their land, so he hopes they’ll agree to participate in a borough program that waives tipping fees for qualifying junkyard-property owners who haul the stuff to the landfill.
Misewicz, the fire investigator, says the owners are elderly and the property wasn’t insured, so they probably could use the help.
“After any fire, there’s always the potential for hazardous materials,” he said in an interview last month. “And so at some point, there’s going to have to be some kind of a cleanup there.”
Misewicz says he couldn’t find what started the fire, but he suspects it was caused by transients living on the property. He expects to complete his investigation report soon.
