Landfill fire expected to take 3 weeks to extinguish, has cost Yellowknife $80K so far

The City of Yellowknife expects it's going to take another three weeks to completely extinguish a fire burning within a heap of construction and demolition waste at its solid waste facility. 

The city said it first detected the hotspot after noticing melting snow on Oct. 30. Sometime in early January, however, the city said it had escalated to what they're now calling a subsurface fire. 

Garett Cochrane, the city's deputy mayor, told CBC News in an interview Wednesday that although hotspots happen "quite often" and there have been surface fires too, the city has never dealt with a subsurface fire before. A spokesperson for the city confirmed Friday that it was 7,000 square metres in size, representing 10 per cent of the landfill cell it's in. 

They also confirmed this is the longest-lasting fire the dump has had.  

"We are fully confident that we have more than enough resources to deal with it," said Cochrane. He said the fire department, which is working alongside contractors to extinguish the fire, considers it to be "fully contained and manageable." 

He said the cause of the fire is under investigation. 

CBC News requested an interview with Chris Vaughn, the city's manager of sustainability and solid waste, about the situation. The city refused to make him available, offering up the deputy mayor instead. 

Cochrane said the city is talking with the Solid Waste Association of North America about the best practices for dealing with a subsurface fire. He said crews have been excavating the area, dousing it with water, and then "handling the leftover aspects of that." 

A statement from the city earlier this month said the area where the fire is burning doesn't have hazardous materials, and that water runoff from the firefighting efforts is being carefully monitored. 

So far, Cochrane said the situation has cost the city $80,000. It's been diverting resources to deal with the issue, and that's why the city is closing the landfill to the public on weekends in January. 

Cochrane also said that it was expected to take another three weeks for the fire to be extinguished based on information from environmental authorities and the city's own safety experts. The city said the $80,000 figure doesn't account for work that'll be done in the coming weeks.

Cochrane is also familiar with the terrible smell that has, at times, emanated from the landfill in recent weeks. He caught a whiff at the end of his holidays.

"It was incredibly not pleasant," he said. "But you know, this is the nature of a subsurface fire."