Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Remediation next for stump dump fire site
Plans for restoration to be submitted after stabilization
BELLA VISTA — Today was the deadline for an underground fire burning since late last summer to be extinguished, but contractors beat the deadline by more than a week.
The next phase will be remediation.
Three contractors started work May 18 after the Bella Vista Property Owners association took the job of extinguishing the fire and cleaning the site from the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality on May 3. City firefighters discovered the fire at the old stump dump on Trafalgar Road on July 29.
Work is being done to stabilize the site now that the fire is out. That work could take another week. The association has 60 days to submit site restoration plans to Environmental Quality after stabilization of the site, according to an association email Thursday.
The state will review the plans and offer comments to the association, Donnally Davis with ADEQ said.
Tom Judson, the association’s chief operating officer, gave an idea as to what the site might look like after remediation in a May 6 video posted to the association website.
“So, let’s think about it a year from now, so we’ll have to have a cap over it,” he said. “We will grow vegetation. We have to try to return it to a by-and-large natural environment — trees growing down the road and so forth. So, our hope is that a year, two years, five years from now when people drive by that site they go, ‘Wow, that’s kind of a nice area.’ And maybe someone goes ‘and that’s where the fire was!’ and they go ‘really there was a fire there? It looks pretty nice now.’
“I don’t want to think about just short term, I want to think about long term. Once the fire is out, then what’s the next step and the step after that and how do we make this better.”
Project manager ERM announced the fire was out June 4 in a post to the association website. A drone flight confirmed no hot spots.
ERM is a firm working in environmental planning and compliance, according to the association.
The plan was to extinguish the fire within 30 days at a cost of about $4 million, Judson, said. The association hasn’t publicly said how much it spent putting the fire out.
Contractors logged 12-hour shifts and were dogged by rain and lightning but still got the fire out well before the deadline.
A status report from ERM on Tuesday noted no hazardous substances or hazardous waste have been identified to date. About 13 tires, a mattress, and trace amounts of metal banding and reinforcement steel bars have been discovered in the debris in addition to concrete, the report stated.
“I’m pleased that significant progress has been made and that the Bella Vista POA
was recently able to report that the Trafalgar Road fire has been extinguished,” 3rd District U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Rogers, said Thursday. “I sympathize with families in the area, many of whom I spoke with during this situation, who have endured so much. I look forward to the completion of the remediation work being conducted by the POA with ADEQ’s continued oversight.”
E3 Environmental from Clinton, Miss., was hired to put out the fire, and Little Rock-based CTEH monitored the air quality during excavation of the site, Judson said.
The association operated the dump on leased land from December 2003 to December 2016, when it was covered with soil, Judson said. No one monitored the site the last few years it was open, but staff members would remove trash when possible, he said. The property is now owned by Brown’s Tree Care.