“A volcano underneath that pile:” Iqaluit dump blaze latest in months of toxic fires

Residents of Iqaluit are being advised to stay indoors if they have respiratory illnesses due to yet another fire at the Nunavut capital's dump.

“Stay indoors with windows closed if that’s an option,” Dr. Ryan Allen, an air pollution expert at Simon Fraser University, told Nunatsiaq News.

The fire has been burning since at least May 20 and the Iqaluit Fire Department initially dumped 64,000 litres of water on it.

But the city has decided to let the fire burn itself out, CBC News reported Wednesday.

Fire chief Luc Grandmaison said environmental factors played into the decision not to put out the smoky blaze.

"The more water we put on this, the more runoff there is," he told CBC News. "I'm not an environmentalist, but I sure know all these products have to go somewhere and it goes in the [Frobisher] bay. The less water I use, it's better for the environment."

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This is only the latest of several fires at the Iqualuit dump in recent months, APTN National News reported. Fires have broken out at the landfill in December, January and March.

This could simply be a flareup of previous fires, which have burned deeply within the 40-metre-high garbage pile. Grandmaison described it as "a volcano underneath that pile."

Fires aren't uncommon in city dumps. Firefighters in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond knocked down a blaze at a local landfill just last week, Global News reported.

The web site Waste Management World said the United States records about 8,300 landfill fires a year. The causes range from spontaneous combustion caused by biological decomposition or chemical oxidation, which can raise temperatures to the point of combustion, to the inadvertent burial of something that's still burning.

Once ignited, they're notoriously had to put out. It usually requires pulling apart the buried garbage to get at the deeply embedded burning core or in some cases injecting inert gas such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide to cut off the fire's supply of oxygen.

[ Related: Landfill closed after months-long fire in Cypress County ]

Open-air burning of garbage was the norm in Iqaluit until the city banned it following a suit filed unsuccessfully by local environmental lawyer Paul Crowley in 2001, Nunatsiaq News said.

Crowley says the city should put the current fire out immediately.

“Burning garbage at low temperatures turns certain plastics — something that’s relatively benign and inert — into something that’s dangerous and toxic,” Crowley said.

“Furans and dioxins are some of the most cancer causing agents that are known. We already have high loads up here because of toxins that come from far away that gets deposited in the cold."

Meanwhile, residents with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or other respiratory illnesses were advised to stay inside when smoke from the fire blows over the community, Simon Fraser's Dr. Ryan Allen said.

Healthy adults have little to worry about but those with pre-existing illnesses should avoid strenuous outdoor activities, he said, adding that the longer the smoky air persists the greater the health risk.