Maclean's, May 28, 1990 v103 n22 p50(1) The fire mountain: battling the blaze at a Quebec tire dump. (St. Amble, Quebec) Barry Came. Full Text: COPYRIGHT Maclean Hunter Ltd. (Canada) 1990 The fire mountain Yves Darche stood in a light rain beside his rented bungalow on the outskirts of St-Amable, Que., last week, watching millions of tires burn nearby. "I guess I must have been a little naive," said the 42-year-old, who makes a living out of small investments and doing odd jobs in the farming and bedroom community 20 km east of Montreal. Gesturing towards a dense plume of black smoke billowing from the mountain of discarded tires about 200 m away, he added, "I'm pretty worried now, just like everyone else, but it never occurred to me that anyone would be crazy enough to set fire to the place." The area Darche pointed towards was the largest dump for abandoned car and truck tires in Quebec, a huge repository where 3.5 million tires were stacked in a pile the height of a seven-storey building. The cause of the fire that broke out at the tire dump last week was not immediately known. The blaze ignited about 90 per cent of the tires, creating a black cloud of noxious smoke visible from as far away as Montreal. Members of environmental organizations warned that the fire threatened the health of local residents. They also expressed concern that the fire might inflict lasting damage on surrounding soil and water because of toxic chemicals seeping from the base of the blaze. As about 50 firemen battled to contain the fire, the second in the past four years at the same site, widespread criticism was directed at the Quebec provincial authorities. Opposition politicians blamed Premier Robert Bourassa's Liberal government for ignoring numerous warnings about the potential ecological disaster posed by the St-Amable dump. "You can be sure we'll be accusing the government of criminal negligence," snapped an angry Francois Beaulne, the Parti Quebecois member of the national assembly whose Bertrand riding includes the depot. Meanwhile, heavy rain in the area did not ease the situation late last week because the ferocity of the blaze simply turned the water to steam. As well, the rain hampered firefighters' efforts to contain the blaze and to carry out cleanup operations aimed at pumping toxic oil from the melting tires from several pits firefighters had dug around the site. And truckloads of sand and gravel had to be transported in to build access roads through viscous mud so that pumping equipment could be moved into the area. Environmental and health experts said that the main danger from the fire was probably posed by the possibility that groundwater might be contaminated by toxic chemicals from the melting tires. Still, Ontario environment ministry officials said last week that tests showed no evidence of soil or groundwater contamination following the 17-day fire that burned at a tire dump at Hagersville, Ont., in February. For their part, Quebec officials played down the hazards. Francois Beaudoin, a Quebec communications ministry spokesman at the emergency co-ordinating centre in St-amable, claimed on the second day of the fire that "there are absolutely no health risks or environmental risks. The water is safe. The air is safe. The fire is under control." But St-Amable Mayor Jacques Doyon advised about 125 residents of the town of 5,500 to leave their homes late Thursday as shifting winds threatened to redirect the smoke plume over the town. About 20 residents followed the mayor's advice. While Doyon did not blame anyone for the disaster, other critics did. Following the Hagersville fire, members of environmental organizations warned of the dangers posed by the St-Amable tire dump, where 10,000 tires caught fire four years ago. A 1988 study carried out by the Montreal-based Society to Abolish Pollution declared that the St-Amable depot was a "time bomb waiting to go off." For his part, Quebec Environment Minister Pierre Paradis came under heavy pressure to resign as a result of the St-Amable fire. At a news conference in Quebec City, Paradis acknowledged that more effective safety measures should have been taken at the dump. Paradis said that he asked his cabinet colleagues last February for $5 million to make the seven largest tire dumps in the province safer. The cabinet, however, granted only $3.3 million. "As a result," said the minister, "we had to drop some of the security measures we had hoped to put in place." In the case of the dump at St-Amable, that involved erecting a perimeter fence and speeding up the installation of tire-shredding equipment to enable the waste material to be processed into rubber mats. Paradis said that the site was too small and the tire mountain too large to permit the tires to be divided into smaller piles. When the fire broke out, the security fence was only partially in place and the tire-shredding equipment on the site had broken down. Local residents such as Darche said that those failures, as much as the blaze itself, were what disturbed them the most as they watched St-Amable's inferno of burning tires last week. Article A9083795