Have you ever wondered what it's like to burn a big, like really big, pile of cash?
It looks a lot like a filled-in ravine in Bella Vista where a "stump dump" is burning underground, fouling the air in surrounding areas.
What’s the point?
As the fiscal and environmental impacts of an underground fire in Bella Vista become clearer, parties responsible for an unpermitted dump site must be held accountable.
In an eye-popping draft response plan submitted by the Memphis consulting and engineering firm EnSafe, the technically feasible approaches to extinguishing the blaze are expected to take more than a year of work and somewhere between $21 million and $37 million to put into action.
The underground burn, which is happening in what the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality describes as an illegal dump site, is belching smoke and particulates into the air. Gov. Asa Hutchinson has proclaimed the site "an ongoing threat to public health and safety," a finding supported by the Arkansas Department of Health.
Previously, Hutchinson pledged at least $1 million to begin addressing the public health emergency and said early estimates suggested it would take $7 million to $10 million to extinguish the blaze.
Those estimates went up in smoke on Thursday.
Hutchinson called the new estimates "stunning," and who would dispute the characterization? On Thursday, he announced he had instructed the Department of Environmental Quality and Ensafe to "explore more cost-effective alternatives" while the state also pursue help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The state will also begin work to prepare the site for cleanup by taking steps necessary regardless of which approach is taken.
The site is, the state agency said in a 2018 letter to the landowner, an illegal dump site operated without permits, first by the Bella Vista Property Owners Association and now by Brown's Tree Service, or BTS Equipment, LLC.
The context of this week's astonishingly large estimates for vanquishing the smoldering fire reiterates the question: How could this happen? It seems likely an investment of much smaller amounts in a permitted landfill years ago would have avoided an out-of-control environmental emergency in 2019. The crisis certainly demands action to get the health dangers under control, but the millions of dollars for cleanup this will require and the impact it is having on nearby neighbors demands an investigation into which private parties are responsible, why the dump could be operated for so long without proper authority or attention, and how similar environmental disasters can be avoided.
Commentary on 01/18/2019