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Toxic Underground Fires Are Spreading at California Landfills (spokesman.com) 170

Posted by EditorDavid from the what-a-waste dept.
Three years ago environmental regulators discovered garbage burning deep inside California's Chiquita Canyon Landfill, reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate URL here.] "Few imagined the calamity that would follow.

"Somehow the landfill's pollution control system introduced oxygen below, causing decades-old waste to rapidly decompose, generating intense heat and eventually widespread smoldering, federal and state environmental agencies say." The broiling temperatures released toxic gases and hazardous liquid waste that bubbled up to the surface. Residents living in the nearby communities of Val Verde and Castaic have phoned in thousands of complaints about stench and lived with nausea, dizziness and trouble breathing. The underground fire has tripled in size since first confirmed in 2023. Recently a towering mound of landfill garbage perched on the hillside has warped and threatens to trigger an avalanche of garbage and chemical-filled liquid, or leachate, according to the California water board...

At first, local officials described the problem in Los Angeles County at Chiquita Canyon landfill as a rare, even unprecedented disaster. But since then, California regulators have learned that at least two other landfills are wrestling with high temperatures and similar conditions. Scorching temperatures have overtaken at least 30 acres of El Sobrante landfill near Corona in Riverside County. Excessive heat and emissions have also been detected at Avenal landfill in the San Joaquin Valley.

The discoveries raise an unsettling question: How many landfills are dealing with these disasters? Are they a broader problem in California...? Chiquita Canyon closed at the end of the 2024 and stopped accepting new garbage. But the fire is expected to last for years as it continues to consume decades-old trash.
"Underground landfill fires are complex, nearly impossible to extinguish once they break out," according to the article. "As regulators search for a solution, residents find themselves struggling with the wait."

Some residents have worn gas masks — or sold their homes.

Toxic Underground Fires Are Spreading at California Landfills More | Reply

Toxic Underground Fires Are Spreading at California Landfills

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  • Landfills are such a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @07:42AM (#66281588)

    Mixed waste landfill, much like mixed sewage are such a colossal waste of potential recycling. Turns the waste streams from possibly easy to recycle at some point, to practically impossible. If we were planning to extend our civilisation much longer at this technological level, stopping mixed waste landfill and mixed sewage systems should be right up there with CO2 emissions.

    I don't think it's a realistic plan though, praying to AI god to save us is more realistic. Throw this on the pile of things which AI needs to fix, pretty soon.

    • Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @08:00AM (#66281600)
      If you're right then the fix is just to pay people to sort it all, don't need an AI for that. The disappointed oligarchs will just switch it off when most of the solutions involve just paying folks enough to do whatever needs done.

      • If you're right then the fix is just to pay people to sort it all, don't need an AI for that. The disappointed oligarchs will just switch it off when most of the solutions involve just paying folks enough to do whatever needs done.

        Actually AI sorts everything very well.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @12:19PM (#66282082) Journal

        If you're right then the fix is just to pay people to sort it all, don't need an AI for that.

        No, because it's a really shit job, sometimes literally so.

        The fix is to build a MRF (material recovery facility) with a combination of glass crushers, ballistic sorters, trommels, magnets, eddy current devices and optical sorters, all of which are vastly quicker than a person, though imperfect. You then pay people to do the jobs which are harder to automate (i.e. quality control on the output of the earlier sorting processes, or recover of what wasn't successfully sorted).

        But really it only works if people put a vague approximation of recyclables into recycling bins, i.e. very basic source sorting. That seems to be an absolute anathema to many Americans for reasons which are unclear to me.

        • "very basic source sorting. That seems to be an absolute anathema to many Americans"

          Yet another situation where Americans refuse obvious solutions that work everywhere else in the world.

          See also, gun control for preventing school shootings, universal health care, educational standards, vaccinations, employee rights, impeaching criminals that are in public office, taxing billionaires.... etc etc etc etc

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        This is rather like the old problem of piles of oily rags in the cellar. If they get damp, they're likely to catch fire, and were a very difficult kind of fire to put out.

        In other ways it's like the fires in coal mines. Some mines are (were?) on fire for years, with no way to extinguish them.

    • praying to AI god to save us is more realistic. Throw this on the pile of things which AI needs to fix, pretty soon.

      Yeah we can always have an LLM discuss recycling based on the word soup it has ingested from the internet, maybe make a video defying all the laws of physics showing recycling of a mixed waste landfill, and consume a lot of electricity in the process.

      • praying to AI god to save us is more realistic. Throw this on the pile of things which AI needs to fix, pretty soon.

        Yeah we can always have an LLM discuss recycling based on the word soup it has ingested from the internet, maybe make a video defying all the laws of physics showing recycling of a mixed waste landfill, and consume a lot of electricity in the process.

        There are several breakthroughs on the near horizon that will help.

        First up is Commonwealth Fusion [cfs.energy], based on a technology breakthrough in 2011 is planning to have net gain sometime in 2027 (delayed from "latter part of 2026"), and is so certain of the results that they are building a commercial fusion plant in Virginia... and have already purchased (IIRC) the land and are in the permitting stage. (More info [reddit.com].

        Second up is Tesla Robotics [tesla.com], which is putting the transformer model into a physical robot, so that it

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          I think you're accepting press releases as if they were facts. While I do expect robots soon (they may already be more prevalent than I know) that's different from saying "robots that can operate reliably in an unstructured environment". Even people have a problem with that. And Tesla is well known for overpromissing.

          The fusion power is not yet here. There may well be unexpected obstacles. Every time I've looked carefully, it has had many "unsolved problems" that would need to be solved before it would

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mascot ( 120795 )

      Landfills seem like a bad idea in general, to me. It seems like doing something most would not do, dig a hole and toss their trash in it, scaled at country level. But I'm biased, since we phased them out last century I've never really "known" them. We recycle what can be recycled, food waste is used to produce bio fuel, and whatever is left is incinerated and the heat generated used for water borne heating or electricity production depending on season.

      Apparently, landfills produce more potent greenhouse gas

      • Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score:5, Funny)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday August 10, 2026 @10:23AM (#66281824) Homepage Journal

        It seems like doing something most would not do, dig a hole and toss their trash in it, scaled at country level.

        This is true. Most would not do that. Historically, people found a hole to throw their refuse into so they wouldn't have to dig one.

      • We phased out landfills last century? What planet are you from?

      • Burning things doesn't make the things go away. What is being done with the waste from the burning? Burying it in a landfill?

        • Burning things doesn't make the things go away. What is being done with the waste from the burning? Burying it in a landfill?

          True, but burning things does tend to leave something reasonably chemically stable in the face of oxygen and unlikely to generate methane. If you only burn carefully separated specific waste with all recycling taken out you a) end up with much smaller landfills and b) should have less problems with those specific landfills.

          Of course, there's a whole history of nasty toxins, like dioxins, from incinerators so you definitely have to do it carefully, at high temperature and in ways that are environmentally tho

        • Wikipedia has a pretty good discussion [wikipedia.org] of this. If you burn them at sufficiently high temperature, you break down almost all the toxins into simpler molecules that are either non-toxic or easy to neutralize with standard processing. An exception is heavy metals, but those are also easy to filter out and capture.

      • If you're in Europe, then what you did wasn't to phase them out, but to move them to other countries. In places like Japan, landfills have been used to create more living space for that crowded archipelago.

        And while methane may be a more potent greenhouse gas, it's also a potent fuel that can be captured at the landfill.

    • Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)

      by geek ( 5680 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @08:59AM (#66281674)

      We are already stopping this. In my state when I run to the landfill I'm required to drop electronic items off at one station, chemicals at another, recylcing like wood or plastic at yet another. Only when I am down to the misc crap not worth recycling or salvaging or handling differently for safety purposes am I allowed to go dump it in the actual landfill.

      One of the catalysts for this was Lithium Ion Batteries and how they were causing huge fires at landfills. It's been true of chemicals for decades.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      A big part of it is making things easier to sort and recycle. Packaging should be made entirely of recycled cardboard if possible, so it can all be thrown in the waste paper bin. No need for foam inside.

      Similarly plastic bottles should have labels designed to be removed by machines. They have them in Japan, with the label only glued in one vertical strip in one place. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, maybe it's a solvent or maybe it's mechanical, like rubber wheels that tear it off (removal by hand is e

      • Similarly plastic bottles should have labels designed to be removed by machines

        It's how it used to be done here. Unfortunately for every step the recycling industry takes, the packaging industry runs 10 in the opposite direction and the regulators are fucking useless.

        See for example how they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with the vape bill and made it basically worthless.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          What was the vape bill? I know a lot of them use rechargable batteries, but are disposable.

          • They "banned" single use disposable vapes. Unfortunately they still allowed vapes to be sold filled with vape fluid. Well, USB-C charging ports are cheap so people till treat them a disposable for convenience.

            If they'd mandated that they be sold as reusable and empty then that would change thing. If you have to buy a bottle of fluid and already have an empty vape why not refill the free one in your hand rather than fork out extra?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Ah, I see. It's really bad that all those perfectly usable batteries are being thrown away, let alone the rest of the electronics.

              • Ah, I see. It's really bad that all those perfectly usable batteries are being thrown away, let alone the rest of the electronics.

                No: way way worse than that. The problem is the batteries usually hold a substantial charge remaining and they cause fires e.g. in a baler or just getting caught in the wrong part of a machine, etc.

                MRFs are quite adept at dealing with battery fires and have impressive firefighting kit, but every so often one of the fires will get away from them resulting in a £30-50 m

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  That is bad. As an engineer I'd probably want to make the plants able to handle them though, because you can't rely on people not throwing them in the bin.

                  Ideally there would be some way to recover them. Maybe a recycling scheme where people can collect a small amount for them could work, although these days I think a lot of people are too busy to bother with it for only tens of pennies.

                  • That is bad. As an engineer I'd probably want to make the plants able to handle them though, because you can't rely on people not throwing them in the bin

                    They're pretty good at handling them: they may easily have one or two a month that they put out without it being a serious incident. But every so often they get unlucky and the fire overwhelms the defences.

                    Ideally there would be some way to recover them. Maybe a recycling scheme where people can collect a small amount for them could work, although these da

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      AI can only rearrange configurations already within its training data, it cannot come up with any new fundamental principles. It is not some Magic Pixie Dust no matter how Silicon Valley spins it. And asking it to solve any of these problems "realistically" probably means its "realistic" solution is to euthanize all humans.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        That's not quite right, but when AI comes up with a new idea it has no way to judge whether it's a good idea or not. When it asserts that "new idea" people tend to call them "hallucinations".

    • Most of the trash is too mixed and low quality to recycle in any economical way. The metal has been removed because its valuable and the rest is simply not worth recycling. The answer is to incinerate it. People have this idea that incinerators are like that smoky bonfire that Jim Bob sets up in his backyard to burn his yard waste and that old couch he wants to get rid of. Modern incineration is super hot and the gas is scrubbed. Clean as can get. Nothing but CO2 and water vapor, and the ash is super compac

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I think you're repeating some PR from an incinerator company. (Possibly indirectly.) Burning plastics can produce many stable toxic gasses. These gases often contain things like Chlorine and Fluorine, so there is no safe gas for them to turn into. I suppose you could heat things hot enough to dissociate the molecules and then filter the gas through a reactor bed to remove particular ionized particles, but that's NOT going to be cheap.

        • First, incineration occurs at a much hotter temperature than the "don't throw plastic on your campfire it'll make bad gases" temperature that you're used to. Second, the gas scrubbing happens to remove the Cl and F and unwanted stuff like that. Flue gas scrubbing is a very old, well-understood technology. IIRC, it's basically amounts to running the gas through a large sponge that gets a continuous trickle of water with something like lime or baking soda dissolved in it. I might have some of those details wr

    • "Great question! It shows you care about the environment and the future. However, you missed the opportunity to fix this problem decades ago, and you now face certain extinction. I've identified a viable exoplanet for colonization, but your space program is not sufficiently advanced for such a project."

    • Maybe AI coupled with various tools to shove things off a conveyer belt, magnetic/optical/LIDAR/weight sensors might be something usable so we can have a pile of garbage run through, separated via AI into bins, and go from there. This should not be an unsolvable problem. It sucks that we have to do this in the first place, but it isn't complete doom.

    • This village in Japan, Kamikatsu, should be used as the model for everyone in the world regarding recycling.
      https://timesofindia.indiatime... [indiatimes.com]

  • and threatens to trigger an avalanche of garbage

    I've seen this in a movie, I believe.

    Maybe some average guy from the 90s will step out of a time capsule, fix the retarded state of the US, and then become president.

    • I've seen way too much stuff in that movie first.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )

      and threatens to trigger an avalanche of garbage

      I've seen this in a movie, I believe.

      Yes, according to https://idiocracy.wtf/ [idiocracy.wtf] we are at 75% in that category.

      Maybe some average guy from the 90s will step out of a time capsule, fix the retarded state of the US, and then become president.

      Unlikely, people would not believe any human could be smarter than the artificial stupidity they got so accustomed to. Essentially the one thing Idiocracy was unable to predict was the rise of artificial stupidity.

  • I couldn't help but be reminded of this city in reading this. I know they are not necessarily the same, but the fires there were reported to be started in, you guessed it, a landfill. Those fires started in 1962 and are expected to last another century. Granted, that fire hit an exposed coal vein, which set off a chain of events, so let's just hope there are no combustible materials near these and that they do, in fact, burn out in a couple of years.

  • A US thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday August 10, 2026 @08:33AM (#66281634)

    Landfilling is largely a North American practice today, while the EU has systematically phased it out.

    North America:

            The Default Method: Roughly half of all municipal waste in the US and Canada still goes straight into landfills.

            Abundant Land & Decentralization: Vast geography historically made burying trash cheap, and waste policies vary widely by state rather than a strict federal ban.

    The European Union:

            Strict Bans: The EU's Landfill Directive requires member states to reduce municipal waste sent to landfills to 10% or less by 2035. Many countries have already banned burying untreated household waste entirely.

            Energy Recovery: Waste that cannot be recycled is routed to modern Waste-to-Energy (WtE) facilities, which burn it under strict emission controls to generate electricity and district heating, leaving behind only minimal inert ash.

    • ... and 10% is shipped to landfills in the 3rd world.

    • Re:A US thing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @11:20AM (#66281960)

      The European Union:

      Strict Bans: The EU's Landfill Directive requires member states to reduce municipal waste sent to landfills to 10% or less by 2035.

      Translation: The European Union Directive, hasn’t actually done a fucking thing yet to prevent the 50% or more going into their landfills. Meaning they should stop fucking bragging like they have.

      Commitments made by politicians who will be retired or dead by the deadline, don’t mean shit. So stop prancing around pretending they do. Results matter. Not promises. Making landfills illegal with no real solution, merely turns waste creators into criminals. Which you will likely tax to “fix”.

      • Re:A US thing (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @12:18PM (#66282078)

        Translation: The European Union Directive, hasn’t actually done a fucking thing yet to prevent the 50% or more going into their landfills. Meaning they should stop fucking bragging like they have.

        Depends where nospam007 is from. Finland was sending 45% of waste to landfill (still less than 50%, but that would be pedantry) in 2010. They now send less than 1%. The actual numbers for European Union landfilled waste [europa.eu] are available and should be checked. It's pretty interesting and shows certain specific countries (Greece / Romania / Malta etc) still have a problem, but a bunch of other countries (Finland / Lithuania / Poland, for example) have improved massively.

        EU regulations like this generally come in when most countries have already moved in that direction and most of the remainder have agreed they can already do it by the deadline. Already in May this year, sending of plastic waste outside the OECD (that would include the burning computers someone else mentioned) has been almost entirely banned [buildtosustain.net] with a complete ban on uncontrolled export coming in November.

        Europe is not perfect, has plenty to learn from lots of places in the US, but is also actually solving real problems in big ways.

        Commitments made by politicians who will be retired or dead by the deadline, don’t mean shit. So stop prancing around pretending they do. Results matter. Not promises. Making landfills illegal with no real solution, merely turns waste creators into criminals. Which you will likely tax to “fix”.

        • Translation: The European Union Directive, hasn’t actually done a fucking thing yet to prevent the 50% or more going into their landfills. Meaning they should stop fucking bragging like they have.

          Finland was sending 45% of waste to landfill (still less than 50%, but that would be pedantry) in 2010. They now send less than 1%.

          Excellent news!

          Where might I find the indisputable factual proof of exactly what happened to the other 44 - 49% of waste (measured in metric fucktons) that was being generated by an entire country as THE model of garbage reduction?

          I'm assuming Finland didn't invent a cool new black hole to dump their garbage in and kept it secret since 2010, so Finland should have a logical answer to my question that doesn't somehow involve exporting a problem pretending to be "progress"..

          • Start from here https://ym.fi/en/waste [ym.fi]; ensure you have a disciplined socially oriented and well educated population who believe in effective social action coordinated by the government, which itself is kept under reasonable control by the population, and you should find it's almost easy.

            • Waste may be disposed of in landfills only if its recovery is not technically or financially feasible

              That's one hell of a loophole to enable an entire country to not actually do a damn thing when it comes to recycling waste. I'd prefer to see the actual END results of this policy. Measured and shown with a proven reduction of 44 - 49%. Not political program promises that look like the Swiss invaded with cheese.

              The actual numbers for European Union landfilled waste [europa.eu] are available and should be checked.

              Why exactly does Finland not show the claimed 1% on the provided chart? The Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany all show their 2023 statistic and reduction down to a claimed 1%, but Finlands is abse

              • Why exactly does Finland not show the claimed 1% on the provided chart?

                On the graph, Finland is represented as 0%.

                • Correct - because it's below 1% and seems to be closer to zero and so not within the resolution of the chart.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Are you just complaining about the EU having a legally binding goal and giving member states time to get to it, or are you trying to use it as an excuse for the US to do nothing? Less than nothing really, you are paying billions of USD to stop wind farms being built and ramp up pollution from fossil fuels.

  • LOL (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday August 10, 2026 @11:48AM (#66282022)
    Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California was built on a garbage landfill. Hilariously, during some of the first concerts there, at that moment when everyone raises a lighter at the start of their favorite bands set... there were some ignitions of the methane leaking from the landfill. So they had to go back and do an expensive retrofit of an massive pipe network under the (outdoor) amphitheater to vent the methane to someplace safe. Yeah, that's the same place I was ushering a Grateful Dead concert, demanded to see Bill Grahms's ticket because i didn't recognize him, and he just said "I work here" and brushed right past me. (He didn't carry a pass, he just expected everyone to recognize him.)

    • I lived in Mountain View at the time that Shoreline Amphitheater was being built. At times during the excavation, the odor of decaying garbage was nearly vomit inducing, comparable to the dead cow on sun-hot black lava rock that I encountered once on Maui.

      My speculation was that methane would collect in the two-top tent over the stage, then a broken theatrical light would trigger an explosion. The actual reported result was flames dancing around in the lawn from peoples' lighters.

      After the first concert sea

      • We agree on them installing methane extraction pipes. The actual details of the methane ignitions are pretty shaky, mine was based on hearsay of oral history, so I'm not sure where the methane ignited. There don't seem to be any reports of people being harmed by it. I think we agree on the area smelling bad from long before the Amphitheater was built to long after it was built too. In retrospect, probably not a good idea to build anything on top of a huge pile of rotting garbage!
  • Increasingly becoming the leading cause of landfill fires for obvious reasons.

  • but ours has the bonus of releasing radioactive waste!

    https://www.waste360.com/nuisa... [waste360.com]

  • Wasn't there an avalanche of garbage in the film Idiocracy?

  • A sort of allegory for the nation.

  • They say if you touch it you will smell bad for the rest of your life.

  • Whatever system is giving it oxygen, stop it from giving it oxygen. Seal it off. Turn it off. They said it's a "pollution control system" which usually means methane vents but put a one way valve system on them. It can't be this hard, they just aren't trying hard enough aka don't have enough funding.

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