Landfill Fire Draws Massive Response
Lithium Battery Believed To Be The Likely Cause
Black smoke that could be seen for miles climbed into the sky near Buena Vista late Monday afternoon as firefighters from every department in Rockbridge County responded to a fire at the Rockbridge County landfill.
The firefighters remained on the scene for over six hours, putting more than 110,000 gallons of a water mixture on the burning trash before the fire was extinguished.
The cause of the fire, landfill officials believe, was likely a lithium battery that ignited.
Brad Zollman, Rockbridge County fire-rescue deputy chief, said someone who saw smoke in the area called the fire into central dispatch, with the call going out to first responders at 4:51 p.m. No one was at the landfill at the time, with staff all having gone home for the day.
The Buena Vista Fire Department and the Rockbridge County duty officer were first on the scene of the fire, which was “going pretty good” by the time they arrived, said Zollman. They were followed by units from all the fire departments in Rockbridge, along with the Buena Vista Rescue Squad.
Zollman said the firefighters started a tanker shuttle, with tanker trucks bringing water to the scene from a fire hydrant several miles away. With that water, they were able to maintain five landlines to put water on the fire at a rate of about 800 gallons a minute.
To allow the water to better absorb into the materials at the landfill, the firefighters mixed it with an F-500 Encapsulator Agent, which looks like a foam but isn’t. It does not contain harmful fluorinated chemicals or PFAS.
The water that the firefighters put on the fire, Zollman said, went into the landfill’s leachate pond. He said the Department of Environmental Quality was notified of the incident.
As part of the firefighting effort, a drone operated by the Rockbridge Regional Public Safety Communications Center provided aerial reconnaissance.
Zollman said the firefighters left the scene at 11:30 Monday night.
Fred Dudley, director of the Blue Ridge Resource Authority, which runs the landfill, said he first learned of the fire around 5 p.m. when central dispatch called to ask whether the landfill was conducting a controlled burn after receiving reports of smoke in the area.
“My response was no, because we were not conducting a controlled burn,” Dudley said.
Within minutes, a follow-up call confirmed that the landfill’s working face was on fire.
Dudley and two other staff members came in to assist the responding fire departments, which he said did “a fantastic job” with a large number of crews working the scene throughout the evening.
After fire departments cleared the site and determined it safe to leave, Dudley and his two staff members stayed for roughly another hour, covering the affected area with soil to prevent overnight flare-ups. As of Tuesday, no additional flare-ups had been reported.
Dudley believes the fire was started by a lithium battery, a problem he said is a growing concern for landfills across Virginia and the country.
“Something as simple as a cell phone that’s been discarded, the cell phone battery can cause fires,” he said. Larger batteries, such as those found in electric ride-on toys and scooters for children, pose an even greater risk. When those batteries are compacted in a landfill and crack, allowing water inside, Dudley said they can ignite rapidly.
The longer-term concern, he added, may be even more difficult to manage. As waste accumulates over years and decades, a buried battery sitting under 30 or 40 feet of refuse could ignite without anyone knowing and smolder for weeks, months, or potentially longer before the fire is ever detected.
Dudley urged residents to be mindful of how they dispose of lithium batteries, noting that the issue extends to any battery containing lithium, regardless of size.
The last fire at the landfill occurred nine years ago.
