Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas and Coun. Rob Ward wrote to the Alberta government on Sunday calling for the immediate release of detailed air quality testing results from a landfill fire that has been burning in the city’s southeast for more than a week. That a mayor has to send a letter to obtain environmental data about smoke drifting over his own city is the part of this story worth pausing on.
The fire started Sept. 6 at the former site of ECCO Recycling and Energy Corp. near Quarry Park, according to CBC News. Crews suppressed it the following day, but fires reignited Sept. 9 and have burned since. The Calgary Fire Department warned residents in communities downwind, including Douglasdale, Quarry Park, McKenzie Towne and New Brighton, that air quality was deteriorating. Residents reported throat and lung irritation, and many have asked what the testing is actually showing.
Environment and Protected Areas Minister Grant Hunter said the province deployed a mobile air-monitoring laboratory and sent samples for expedited analysis. As of Sept. 10, Hunter said, no hourly-average readings had exceeded provincial air quality objectives.
“Residents have raised understandable questions about the smoke affecting their communities,” Farkas said in remarks reported by CBC News. “They deserve clear, verified information and full transparency from the provincial authorities responsible for environment monitoring.”
The phrase “provincial authorities” is doing a lot of work there, and it points at the structural problem. Landfills in Alberta are regulated by the province under the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, and they remain under provincial monitoring after they stop accepting waste. Municipalities control land use, setbacks and building codes. The practical result is that the fire department fighting this blaze and issuing the public advisories is not the body that holds the site approval, operates the monitoring lab, or decides when the readings get released. A letter is roughly the extent of the mayor’s leverage.
It is also worth being precise about what the province has and has not said. An hourly average that sits below an objective is a real data point, but it is a narrow one. Alberta’s Ambient Air Quality Objectives are the province’s principal regulatory tool for ambient air, and they set thresholds for a defined list of substances. Shorter spikes can pass through a neighbourhood without moving an hourly figure, and a fire burning construction and demolition waste can release compounds that are not on the objectives list at all. None of that means residents have been harmed. It does mean “no exceedances” is a narrower statement than it sounds, and that publishing the underlying numbers, substance by substance, is a different thing from summarizing them.
There is a land-use history here that the wire coverage has largely skipped. ECCO built its 24th Street S.E. landfill in 1993, when the location sat on Calgary’s outskirts. The city then grew toward it. Quarry Park’s residential and office redevelopment, along with McKenzie Towne and New Brighton, filled in afterward. Calgary now publishes landfill and waste facility setback rules governing how close new development can go, but the households breathing this smoke are living downwind of a siting decision made more than three decades ago, before most of those neighbourhoods existed.
This is also not the first fire at the operation. Global News has reported on earlier blazes at ECCO’s Quarry Park recycling facility in previous years, a pattern that raises a question neither level of government has answered publicly this week: what, if anything, changed at the site after those fires.
The immediate questions are narrower and more answerable. What specific substances did the mobile lab measure, at what locations, and over what averaging periods? Will the province publish the raw data or only a summary? And who is responsible for extinguishing a fire on a closed private site, rather than simply monitoring the air above it? Calgary residents are waiting on a government they did not elect at city hall to answer them.
Reporting on the fire and the province’s response via CBC News, with additional confirmation from The Canadian Press.
