The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is wrapping up its two-month operations at the site of the Moody landfill fire northeast of Birmingham.

EPA On-scene Coordinator Subash Patel said EPA personnel will remain to monitor the landfill into April, but that most of the agency’s work is finished.

“We are in the final stages,” Patel told AL.com late last week.

The Environmental Landfill, Inc., in St. Clair County caught fire on Nov. 25, 2022, and had flooded the nearby areas of Moody and Trussville with smoke for months as local and state fire crews were unable to put the fire out.

The EPA took over the site on January 19 after air samples showed potentially hazardous chemicals in the smoke, and expects to finish the job in early April.

Patel said the agency has finished bringing in fill dirt to cover the site of the fire — 2,599 truck loads worth — and covered about 90 percent of the site with hay and grass seed to create a lasting vegetative cover over the site area.

He said there are still occasional puffs of smoke that emerge from the ground that they keep wet, and the rainwater that comes out from the site is still warm, indicating that some of the material is still smoldering under the dirt.

“There’s no smoke leaving the property,” Patel said. “These are just really small puffs of smoke, smoldering really.”

Patel said the water exiting the site will probably be warm for several weeks, until the site cools completely.

“The best way to describe the situation is like an oven that’s cooling,” he said. “We want it to continue to rain, we want that water to continue soaking down into the landfill to help cool it off.”

One thing that Patel said stood out to him was the size of the fire.

“This was a really large site, maybe one of the largest landfills that we’ve addressed in our region,” he said. “There were no surprises, things seem to be going according to plan. We were hoping to finish by the end of March or first week of April and it looks like we’re going to meet that timeline.”

Patel said EPA was meeting this week with state and local officials to create a timeline for the transition.

Once the EPA leaves, the site will return to state and local control.

Part of that will include an investigation into the owners and operators of the landfill, and part of that will be the state assessing itself and trying to ensure this kind of situation doesn’t happen again.

State and local officials have formed a working group to examine the response and evaluate laws and regulations that hampered the state’s ability to respond to the fire once it broke out.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management is leading the group, which also includes the Alabama Forestry Commission, legislators representing the area, as well as municipal governments.

ADEM Director Lance LeFleur said that the group met once, on March 16, to begin the process.

One of the top issues discussed in the meeting, LeFleur said, was the issue of who had the authority to act in this situation. ADEM felt that because silviculture (tree farming) waste was specifically excluded from the definition of solid waste, they had no authority to regulate the landfill unless unauthorized material was found.

The St. Clair County Commission was concerned that they could not hire a contractor to do the work on privately owned property, and the Forestry Commission simply wasn’t equipped to do more than keep the fire from spreading.

“Each party had certain impediments to be able to act,” LeFleur said. “That was the biggest issue discussed.”

The working group has also been expanded to include Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate, as the issue of tree farming waste may factor into the group’s recommendations.

LeFleur said that while ADEM has taken a lot of criticism for its handling of the fire, the agency did all it could and served as the fire burned out.

He said ADEM reached out to EPA in December and was rebuffed because the EPA doesn’t regulate green waste landfills.

In January, he said it was ADEM that asked EPA to supply the air monitors that eventually got the agency to take over the response. He said the EPA had mobile air monitors that they could put in close proximity to the fire to get readings that would trigger the agency’s takeover.

“EPA, I want to tip my hat to them, they went the extra mile to find a way to come in,” LeFleur said. “The air monitoring was the key to the lock [that allowed the federal response].”

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