Residents in Melbourne’s west were horrified to learn this week that a bushfire that has been burning for almost three years will likely take several more months to die out.
The Sunshine Landfill fire was first identified in November 2019, after air got into compacted waste.
Since then, its owners, Barro Group, have put three hotspots on the tip.
The last one was supposed to be posted this week, but that deadline has come and gone.
This latest hot spot, buried under a pile of waste in an old quarry, is causing headaches for property owners, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and, of course, neighbors.
For almost three years they have been living a few hundred meters from a pile of burning garbage.
The owners of Sunshine Landfill have put three points of interest on the tip since late 2019. (Facebook: Sunshine Landfill)
But let’s start with tip owners
Barro Group spokesman Steve Murphy said the owners never accepted the Aug. 22 deadline imposed by the Environmental Protection Authority.
“It was never physically possible,” he said.
He explained that before workers could put out the fire, they had to drill through the debris to find hot spots.
Once workers found the fires, they had to put them out. This involves using heavy machinery to remove the rubbish from the top of the pile and drive it to the other side of the tip to cool overnight. Every night, you need to cover the waste that is burned.
And there are nearly 1 million cubic meters of waste in the landfill.
At the top of the pile, where the waste is cooler, the process can move quite smoothly.
“This can be a ‘dig and dump,’ pretty quickly,” Murphy said.
But as workers approach the fire at the bottom, the waste buckets can reach temperatures of up to 150-180 degrees Celsius.
“When you get to hot to hot waste, we have people standing where the excavation is, putting water on it, we have another individual temperature check on each bucket as it goes into the dump truck,” he said. .
With hot waste, up to 500 cubic meters of waste can be extracted per day, if nothing else goes wrong.
Rain and understaffing are also to blame
Murphy said the company had lost seven weeks of work over the past six months, including 26 days due to wet weather.
“It’s not just the day it rains, it could be another day or half a day after the crews get the site back to a safe state,” he said.
“And by that I mean scraping roads, putting extra gravel on the roads because they have very heavy machinery working on them, and because of the amount of roofing material we have to use, the minute it rains a little bit, it all becomes clay”.
Barro Group spokesman Steve Murphy says the council is dealing with staff shortages. (Facebook: Sunshine Landfill)
He said they lost nine days due to staff illness, including COVID.
“The fact is we’re in the midst of the worst labor shortage we’ve seen in Australia across all industries for the better part of 35 years,” he said.
“You can’t turn around, because someone calls and says, ‘mate, I can’t come in for the next seven days because I’ve got the ‘rona’, you know, you’re calling an employment agency and saying we need someone here at 11 of this morning, you have Buckley’s,” he said.
“It’s not an excuse, it’s just reality.”
He said the fire should be out by the end of the year and the company communicates with locals twice a day through a Facebook page.
EPA is investigating the delays
EPA Western Regional Manager Steve Lansdell said the authority rejected Barro Group’s request to extend the deadline to February 17, 2023 after considering whether it had taken all reasonable steps to comply the August 22 deadline.
“We’ve had our officers out there inspecting the site and checking compliance with the final deadline, which was August 22,” he said.
“So now we are intensifying our research with a view to any possible application options.”
He said those enforcement options include prosecution, revocation of the operator’s license and fines.
In September 2021, the EPA suspended the Barro Group’s operating license after the company failed to meet firefighting deadlines.
This means that the nozzle cannot accept any more debris, at least for now.
The dump in Melbourne’s west used to be a quarry. (Facebook: Sunshine Landfill)
Residents have had enough
Residents like Nicole Power continue to report their odor complaints to the EPA, sometimes several times a day.
“I smelled it last night, it was that horrible cattle truck smell,” he said.
He said living 350 meters from a fire for years was affecting his mental health.
“I’m so tired of being woken up by the smell, I’m so tired and exhausted of not wanting to open the front door in case I smell it, it’s just not fair,” he said.
“You can’t escape it because you’re at home.”
He said residents were worried about their health.
“We have every right to breathe clean air, but apparently if you live in the western suburbs near this landfill, you can’t,” he said.
In 2021, the EPA suspended the Barro Group’s operating license after the company failed to meet deadlines. (ABC News: Margaret Paul)
A statement on the EPA’s website said the authority had listened to community concerns about air quality.
“Air quality monitoring by both EPA and the landfill operator has found a low risk to long-term community health,” the statement said.
“The EPA expects this to continue, but still requires the company to continue on-site air monitoring.”
The EPA is hosting a community meeting in Keilor this week.