From the St. Louis, MO Post-Dispatch:
Disaster plan developed in case fire reaches nuclear waste
Beneath the surface of a St. Louis-area landfill lurk two things that should never meet: a slow-burning fire and a cache of Cold War-era nuclear waste, separated by no more than 1,200 feet.
Government officials have quietly adopted an emergency plan in case the smoldering embers ever reach the waste, a potentially "catastrophic event" that could send up a plume of radioactive smoke over a densely populated area near the city's main airport.
Although the fire at Bridgeton Landfill has been burning since at least 2010, the plan for a worst-case scenario was developed only a year ago and never publicized until this week, when St. Louis radio station KMOX first obtained a copy.
County Executive Steve Stenger cautioned that the plan "is not an indication of any imminent danger."
Sure - an I have a bridge you might be interesting in buying. It's a great investment.
The cause of the fire is unknown. For years, the most immediate concern has been an odor created by the smoldering. Republic Services is spending millions of dollars to ease or eliminate the smell by removing concrete pipes that allowed the odor to escape and installing plastic caps over parts of the landfill.
Directly next to Bridgeton Landfill is West Lake Landfill, also owned by Republic Services. The West Lake facility was contaminated with radioactive waste from uranium processing by a St. Louis company known as Mallinckrodt Chemical. The waste was illegally dumped in 1973 and includes material that dates back to the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb in the 1940s.
And this is not uncommon:
At least 98 underground mine fires in nine states were burning in 2013, according to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.
I grew up a couple hundred miles from the Centralia fire - it was in the news a lot when it first broke out.
Few underground fires can match one in Centralia, Pennsylvania. In 1962, a huge pile of trash in the town dump, near a coal mine, was set on fire, and it has burned beneath the town for more than half a century. Only a few people remain in a community that once had 1,000 residents.
