ACCORDING to news reports on Sunday, the government is racing to gather equipment to smother the burning abandoned landfill in Navotas, which has been burning since the night of April 10 and has turned the atmosphere of Metro Manila and nearby provinces into a foul-looking fog. The announcement of the plan to stop the fire reminded me of another infamous fire related to a garbage dump back in my home state.
On May 27, 1962, a group of volunteer firefighters from the small central Pennsylvania town of Centralia set the town’s small landfill on fire. They had been hired by the town council to clean up the area ahead of the Memorial Day holiday, and while they had not been specifically told to do so by starting a fire, as that was actually against state law, they figured they knew what they were doing. They were firemen, after all, and they had their truck handy to keep things under control.
Things were not kept under control, however. Centralia sat atop Pennsylvania’s anthracite belt, and while active mines were already dwindling by 1962, the ground beneath the town for miles in every direction was honeycombed with old mining tunnels. The town garbage dump was itself a small abandoned pit mine. Even by the lax environmental standards of the day, it should have been properly prepared in order to serve as a landfill, with voids and cracks in the floor and walls filled in, and lined with impermeable — and non-flammable — clay soil. That was never done, of course, and it did not take long for the fire that was set by the firemen to find its way into the underground coal seam.
Over the next few years, there were various attempts to snuff the fire, including trying to bury the garbage pit under tons of soil, pumping a slurry of rock and water into the ground around where engineers thought the edges of the growing fire were, and trying to build earthen barriers to block it. None of that worked, and the fire kept burning. By the early 1980s, heat, toxic gases and collapsing ground made the town of Centralia untenable, and the state government condemned the entire place and moved everyone out. A few diehards hung on; as of 2026, there are reportedly still four residents of the long-abandoned and mostly demolished town, which isn’t even officially a place anymore, as the US Postal Service deleted its zip code years ago. The fire also claimed another nearby town, the village of Byrnesville a couple of miles south of Centralia.
The fire, which is estimated to have spread to about 15 square kilometers by now, is expected to burn for another 250 years, fed by the still-abundant deposits of anthracite coal reaching depths of 300 feet.
Obviously, the fire in the Navotas landfill is not the same thing as an unstoppable coal-seam fire, but what made me think of the parallels was the reaction on the part of the government, which has been eerily reminiscent of the “throw ideas at the wall and hope something sticks” response to the municipal and state officials in the early days of the Centralia fire. The current plan to try to smother the fire by burying it with soil may work, or it may not; and even if it does, the site will have to be monitored for years to ensure that the fire does not reappear. That is an expensive proposition, and one that the government does not seem prepared to undertake — because if it was prepared, this fire probably would not have happened in the first place.
There are regulations for the proper construction and management of sanitary landfills here in the Philippines, and they are generally in line with universally recognized best practices. The landfill should be lined with a thick, impermeable earthen layer, usually clay, or even concrete if they want to make it fancy. Wastewater runoff, called leachate, from the mass of rubbish must be strictly controlled to prevent it from contaminating natural groundwater, or in the case of the Navotas landfill, the waters of Manila Bay. And there must be a gas monitoring and control system, to safely remove the constantly accumulating methane from decomposition in the depths of the pile. Even after a landfill is closed, these environmental systems must be maintained, potentially for decades, or possibly forever. The Navotas landfill, located as it is on low-lying and wet coastal land, requires even more stringent monitoring and maintenance, which it evidently was not getting.
I have read some commentaries, including at least one editorial in a major paper (not ours), arguing that the Navotas problem is a good example of why waste-to-energy (W2E) systems should be more widely adopted throughout the Philippines. That is at best a stretch, and at worst irresponsible greenwashing. W2E can only manage a fraction of the solid waste generated, and does not produce enough electricity to pitch that as a feature; a properly designed W2E facility can generate enough to power itself, and that’s about it. Better to call it what it really is, an advanced incinerator. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is risky, and has to be well-built and competently operated to ensure that its potential hazards — harmful emissions, and some amount of toxic solid waste in the form of ash — are safely isolated from the environment.
And even then, only about 30 percent of solid waste might be eliminated in this way, which makes the question of whether the high cost of W2E systems is actually worth it legitimately debatable. There are no easy or cheap answers to the solid waste crisis, but the steadily growing list of landfill disasters — three so far this year — are ugly reminders that the longer the government waits to try to work the problem, the worse it is going to be.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
