The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is back on the scene of the Moody landfill fire near Birmingham, where the underground smoldering blaze sparked anew after a sinkhole opened.

EPA spokesman James Pinkney said the agency was informed about the blaze yesterday and responded with an on-scene coordinator to assess the situation in Alabama.

Pinkney said there is a sinkhole approximately 15-20 feet in diameter at the site where smoke is coming from.

“With landfill fires, they’ll continue to burn underground and can flare up if they get air,” Pinkney said.

Pinkney said that the plan is to cover the smoldering area with dirt, and then check the rest of the site for hotspots and potential problem areas.

He said the EPA is waiting on equipment and fill dirt to arrive on site, but they hope to have the sinkhole covered by the end of the week.

“As soon as it gets here, the work will begin,” he said.

The fire started in November 2022, burning mostly underground and confounding local and state officials for months until the EPA agreed to take over operations at the site in January.

The agency used heavy equipment to grade and compact the disposal area, then cover it with truckloads of dirt and a landfill-style cap and planted the area with grass to prevent erosion. The EPA finished its main operations at the site around the end of April.

Because the landfill was considered a green waste or vegetative landfill, the operators were not required to follow the safety protocols of most landfills. The site before the fire was described as a massive stack of dead and decaying trees and vegetative matter more than 100 feet tall in places and loosely covered in dirt.

There was at least some unauthorized waste at the landfill as well, as inspections conducted before the fire found household trash, tires, electronics, and treated lumber in the disposal area.

The owners and operators of the former Environmental Landfill, Inc. have been fined $250,000 by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and could face financial responsibility for the costs of EPA’s response to the fire.

Moody Fire Inspector James Mulkey said the department began receiving calls about wafts of smoke from the area around October 3.

“We’d been receiving calls about various smoke smells, and on the third we found some cracks on the backside of the landfill in the clay cap that had some smoke coming out of it,” Mulkey said.

Then on Tuesday, they discovered the smoldering sinkhole, which is when they notified St. Clair County and state officials, who contacted the EPA.

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