GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #958: MOODY AND THE BRIDGE

From the EPA's website

 Have you ever read The Bridge by Skipp and Spector? It's an environmental horror masterpiece. Everyone should read it and fear it. But that's not the world we live in. We've always been (mal?)adroit polluters, and we don't seem to care about the damage we're doing to the planet that is very necessary to our continued existence. As long as our corporate overlords are making money, nothing else matters.

That's not news, but sometimes something so egregious happens that it boggles the mind. I'm thinking of the fire that started at the Moody Landfill near Birmingham, AL. A friend of mine alerted me to this years ago, and I'm only now getting around to it. The most shocking thing about this is, the fire started in 2022 (where was Billy Joel back then?) and is still burning.

"With a landfill, you can never really extinguish the fire," said James Pinkney with the EPA.

“And what we’re doing—the approach we took at this landfill is using soil to basically suffocate the flames. But a landfill can burn for an extended period of time underground.”

Uh . . . what? Never? You mean to tell me that when the sun expands and swallows the earth, that landfill fire will still be burning? That's concerning. Are you trying hard enough?

That can't be good for the people who live nearby. Here's what the EPA advised them to do:

EPA is working with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to review data and appropriately evaluate the potential effects of the smoke from the fire. In the meantime, if nearby residents are concerned and wish to reduce potential exposure to landfill fire smoke, the following actions are recommended:

• If you have respiratory problems such as asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), or emphysema, stay indoors when you see or smell smoke.
• Reduce your outdoor activities, and do them more slowly, when you see or smell smoke.
• Close the doors and windows of your house to keep smoke from getting inside.
• Talk to your health care provider if you have respiratory conditions such as asthma, COPD, or emphysema, and you think your condition may get worse when you breathe smoke.

That doesn't sound like nothing. It sounds like this fire is doing a lot of damage to the people unfortunate enough to live close to this thing. According to Envirotech, while the people suffered, the local and state authorities were too busy pointing the finger at each other to actually do anything. Nothing got done until the feds stepped in, and they supposedly smothered the fire with sand. Here's the thing, though: it didn't extinguish the fire even though they said it did. I'm not going to identify my friend, but I will quote: "The problem is that locals see fire burning and our news had been reporting that it was out. Fucking unbelievable corruption."

The EPA says that they stopped monitoring the landfill on March 24, 2023. That's pretty alarming considering that the fire was still burning at the time. Most sources seem to agree that at the very least the fire burned for 15 months. That puts us early in the year 2024. And the EPA confirmed that forever chemicals are present. And their levels are higher. Not at the landfill. The corrupt fucks have that covered. But someone looked at the river nearby and found them in the water. Enough to raise a red flag. Not enough for national coverage.

I understand that such a situation is difficult, but come on. This should be a fucking priority, and yet I had to be told by a friend about this. And it's not just an Alabama problem. I'm sure this kind of thing happens all over the world.

The landfill was used for vegetative waste, yet the EPA found "unauthorized waste materials," which I can only take to mean that some asshole, much like the assholes in The Bridge, had a bunch of waste they couldn't be bothered to get rid of legally, so they knew a guy at the landfill who would take it. And look at what they've wrought. And no one wanted to take the blame for this, so the local politicians are fucked in the head.

This should be a bigger story, but now that we have the Department of Government Efficiency, I can only assume that the regulations that we *do* have for this sort of thing will be cut. Trump wants to bring drilling back to the US, but how safe can that be if we're pumping toxins into our own soil? What happens if you start to drill, and you hit a pocket of pollution from a burning underground fire? How many die because of that?

If we let these bastards continue, we're fucked. Do you remember how The Bridge ends?

Yeah, I thought so.