The Smoldering, Noxious Waste Dump Next Door – Inside Climate News

Five years ago, Elizabeth Jeffords stood at the top of a pretty, tree-lined street in Castaic, California, admiring the house she and her husband just bought. She loved how the two-story house, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles, looked out onto the Sierra Pelona Mountains. She loved how it sat at the top of a mile-long hill she could use as a personal track. She imagined filling its spacious rooms with the laughter of loved ones and the children she hoped to have. 

But soon after moving in, the former track runner, now 46, began to feel fatigued, dizzy, disoriented and winded. Jeffords grew up with asthma but never had an attack until she moved to Castaic, a small town with a large Latino population. She started getting migraines and vomiting out of the blue. She noticed odd bumps on her face and body and couldn’t quench her thirst no matter how much water she drank. Over the next two years, her symptoms gradually worsened, until she regularly woke up with nosebleeds, gasping for air, worried she might die in her sleep. 

Jeffords, who often wears oversize black glasses that accent her auburn-tinged hair, saw every type of doctor she could think of and spent thousands of dollars on tests. No one could figure out what ailed her. She always kept her windows open until August 2023, when a putrid, chemical odor roused her in the middle of the night. 

The next morning, Jeffords saw on social media that many of her neighbors had complained about the foul smell to the local air district. On her front door, she found a notice from the Chiquita Canyon Landfill offering her and other residents a free air filter.

When the Jeffords’ bought the house, the realtor didn’t disclose that L.A. County’s second-largest landfill operated two and a half miles from their bedroom window. That’s because the landfill was considered too far away to be a public nuisance—regulatory parlance for an unreasonable threat to public health and safety. 

Yet the landfill would destroy Jeffords’ dream of country living. And its unchecked toxic emissions would test her faith in the leaders of a state known as an environmental leader.

The Chiquita Canyon Landfill, Jeffords later learned, generates far more than offensive odors. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions from human activities, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The gas, produced by microbes as they decompose organic matter, warms the atmosphere 86 times faster than carbon dioxide over 20 years. 

Peer-reviewed studies documented the landfill leaking huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere even as its operator, Chiquita Canyon LLC, owned by Waste Connections, captured and sold a portion of the gas as renewable fuel to a power plant.

The landfill also released pollutants that pose serious health risks, an Inside Climate News review of emissions from the South Coast Air Quality Management District shows. Nearly 65,000 pounds of hazardous air pollutants and more than 1.4 million pounds of “criteria” pollutants escaped from the landfill between 2000 and 2022, the most recent available data show.

Safety standards for hazardous air pollutants, which include carcinogens and chemicals that cause birth defects and neurological damage, assume no safe level of exposure exists. Those for criteria pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide—major contributors to smog—aim to provide a “margin of safety.” 

But researchers say that criteria pollutants like particle pollution may have no safe level either.

The landfill also released nearly 30,000 pounds of carcinogens between 2000 and 2022, the Inside Climate News review found, including nearly 6,000 pounds of benzene. It also released more than 11,600 pounds of toluene, which harms the nervous and reproductive systems and has been linked to miscarriages and birth defects, and more than 5,700 pounds of foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide, which causes fatigue, headaches, dizziness and respiratory distress.

Of the hazardous air pollutants that have been identified, benzene is the most toxic, said Seth Shonkoff, executive director of the energy, science and policy research institute, PSE Healthy Energy. 

The landfill violated regulations for benzene in the air, water and soil. Monitors at a post office and a neighborhood park have detected benzene levels several times higher than both one- and eight-hour safety standards.

Some residents first noticed the sickening stench after a monitor showed temperatures spiking under the northwest surface of the landfill in the spring of 2022. 

Not long after, Jeffords started suffering from excruciating tinnitus, nausea, tremors and vertigo so severe it left her confined to bed, unable to run her mortgage and real estate businesses. The tremors, a sign of benzene exposure, made her clench her teeth so hard, a tooth fell out. One day she noticed her two small dogs, Cici and Kiko, shaking alongside her in bed. Pretty soon they were all coughing and vomiting at the same time. Nothing the vet prescribed for her dogs seemed to help.

Jeffords regrets the day she decided to pour her life savings into the house she thought she would never leave. Now, she’s afraid to go outside and fears the place she planned to spend the rest of her days will cut her life short.

Failure to Comply

California regulators say a heat-producing chemical reaction under the landfill’s surface has tripled in size over the past three years. As the smoldering area spread, geysers of toxic liquid waste shot out of the ground.

The fact that there’s “effectively a fire within the landfill” that’s substantially increasing temperatures, Shonkoff said, raises concerns about risks to nearby groundwater resources, including those that provide, or could provide, drinking water.

By 2023, the landfill was producing 1 million gallons of benzene-laden liquid waste a week, nearly seven times more than the year before. The L.A. Regional Water Quality Control Board has cited the landfill several times for threatening ground and surface water.

Jeffords, participating in the hearing from her bed, where she’d been confined for 10 months, couldn’t believe what she heard. One person after another told the board about “obscene” odors they endure nearly every day, deteriorating health, nosebleeds, nonstop coughing, aggravated asthma, vomiting, tremors, headaches, dizziness, miscarriages, cancer. A father from the historically Black town of Val Verde said one night the smell and his family’s coughing were so bad, they drove to Walmart to sleep in the parking lot. 

“This is a public health emergency,” one woman said.

Jeffords told the board her laundry list of health issues “popped up out of nowhere” after she moved to Castaic. She told them the air purifier the landfill provided did nothing and she had to buy a different model for $1,200 to feel safe. When she heard the woman after her rattle off all the same ailments Jeffords suffered from, all the simple joys she’d lost—hosting BBQs, walking her dogs, watching the sun set over the mountains—she froze. Then she cried.

“That was the confirmation that something was going on and it wasn’t just me,” Jeffords said. “It was this landfill. She described every one of my symptoms to a ‘T.’”

Jeffords joined forces with many of the people she heard testify from her bed that day, traveling with them to meetings and begging government officials to hold the landfill operator accountable for making their lives miserable. 

People living near the landfill have filed more than 29,500 odor complaints with the air district since January 2023. 

“Every landfill in the world has emissions, that’s the nature of a landfill,” said a Chiquita Canyon Landfill spokesperson. “What matters is that those emissions are safely and efficiently managed in compliance with regulatory standards.” 

Chiquita Canyon operators are “constantly monitoring” their mitigation measures and community impacts and are in compliance with all health and safety standards. 

Since 2023, however, the district has cited the landfill with more than 360 notices of violation for causing a public nuisance by emitting excessive air contaminants, most recently on August 12.

Any notice of violation from the air district is an allegation that a facility has not complied with one or more air quality rules and regulations, said Rainbow Yeung, a spokesperson for the South Coast Air Quality Management District. In addition to the public nuisance citations, the district has cited the landfill with more than a dozen other violations, including failing to comply with sulfur emission limits and landfill waste excavation requirements, Yeung said.

The landfill gas became so contaminated with sulfur, the power plant that relied on it could no longer convert it to electricity without violating air standards and had to close. 

Over the past two years, first federal and then state EPA officials charged the landfill with posing an “imminent and substantial endangerment” to nearby communities. The agencies ordered the landfill and its $48 billion parent company, Waste Connections, to take immediate steps to mitigate the noxious odors and hazardous leachate.

The Chiquita spokesperson said the company has multiple health reports completed over two years by an independent toxicologist who found “no expected short- or long-term health impacts from the landfill.”

But drawing robust conclusions about short-term health effects requires doing population-size surveys, identifying cases of illness and comparing them to controls, said Shonkoff. “And long-term health effects, by definition, take time to show up.”

If Chiquita is serious about making sure its operation isn’t impacting air quality and endangering human health, Shonkoff said, it should disclose the composition of the landfill gas. Then scientists can feed the components into regulatory-grade air quality models to better understand the emissions’ health impacts and make decisions that protect communities. 

“The landfill is making money and we’re getting sick,” Jeffords told regulators in March. “I’m literally paying the price for it with my life and my life savings.”

On the heels of mounting legal, regulatory, permitting and cost challenges, Chiquita Canyon stopped accepting waste this year. But the “elevated temperature landfill conditions” causing all the air-quality problems may continue for years, the facility said on its website. 

Jeffords and her neighbors say they can’t wait that long. 

What Went Wrong

Jennifer Elkins is a 37-year-old mother of three and president of the Val Verde Civic Association. Like most of her neighbors, she lost count of how many times she’s appealed to government officials for help. 

Val Verde is called the Black Palm Springs, she explains to them, because it was a safe space where people of color could go for recreation and social gatherings when segregation laws were still in effect. The landfill opened in this African American refuge in 1972.

Elkins also tells regulators she’s suffered two miscarriages, had multiple pets and livestock die suddenly and started having unbearable migraines, congestion and sinus problems just before the terrible odors started. She thought it was allergies, until she discovered many of her neighbors were having nearly all the same experiences. Ten neighbors on her block were diagnosed with cancer this year. 

“This is not normal,” she said.

Both of her sons get nosebleeds so severe they just pour out of their nostrils, Elkins said. She transferred her kids to a school far away from the landfill in the middle of the school year because she was afraid for their safety.

Elkins believes stricter regulations and oversight could have prevented what she calls an environmental disaster.

For longtime environmental justice advocate Jane Williams, the disaster started nearly 20 years ago, with California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. The landmark 2006 climate law required California to identify early actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a target the state met four years early.

An obvious early action to reduce climate-warming gases was to target methane. Curbing emissions of this particularly potent short-lived climate pollutant could yield immediate benefits. And methane, the primary component of natural gas, can easily be converted into renewable energy, allowing operators to generate revenue by selling the captured gas.

In 2010 the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, passed the Landfill Methane Rule. Landfills were required to extract the gas before it escapes as fugitive emissions into the atmosphere, and to submit methane-control plans by June of the following year. Projects were under way within a few years. 

There’s just one problem, said Williams, executive director of the environmental justice group California Communities Against Toxics.

“When you extract landfill gas from a landfill, you pull gas out,” she said. “If you’re not really careful, you pull air in.”

That means, Williams added, “you have to actively manage a landfill to make sure that you don’t have too much oxygen in the subsurface and catch your landfill on fire.”

Williams believes a fire is burning under the landfill for many reasons, several of which were identified in a report by state experts, which cited evidence that some of the plastic gas-extraction wells were damaged, a sign of extremely high temperatures. 

Chiquita Canyon representatives have repeatedly claimed there’s no fire under the landfill’s surface, advocating the term “elevated temperature landfill” instead. A state engineer wrote in his expert assessment of the landfill reaction that some landfill operators avoid using the word “fire.” But what you call it is irrelevant to the people living next door, said Ancilla Inocencio, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware who studies the environmental justice impacts of climate change. 

“This Is What Government Is For”

Jeffords and her neighbors have taxed their health, patience and savings traveling around the state asking California officials for help. They finally found a dedicated advocate in their representative, state Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo.

In March of last year, Schiavo urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and provide relocation support for her constituents in Castaic, Val Verde and other affected towns. “The residents are in dire need of support due to air pollution and toxic substances being released by the Chiquita Canyon Landfill,” she said.

Nine months later, L.A. County sued the landfill to bring its operation into compliance and subsidize the relocation of affected residents, among other actions.

And in April, state Sen. Suzette Valladares called on Attorney General Rob Bonta to join the county’s lawsuit to strengthen the case, “given the gravity and scope of the impacts on air quality, public health, and environmental justice.”

So far, California’s governor and attorney general have declined their requests. 

“California is committed to supporting all communities in our state impacted by hazards,” said CalEPA spokesperson Nefretiri Cooley on behalf of the Newsom administration. State environmental regulators have been coordinating with local responders’ investigations and enforcement efforts to protect public health and the environment, Cooley said.

A spokesperson for California’s Department of Justice said the office is closely monitoring the landfill and its impacts on the area and has “actively engaged” with community members and their representatives, advocates and federal and local government officials. “We won’t be able to further comment on any potential investigation or litigation,” the spokesperson said.

In the absence of leadership from the state’s highest officials, thousands of people living near the landfill have filed lawsuits against the landfill and Waste Connections. 

Attorney Nathan Kruger helped other families secure a state of emergency declaration from former Gov. Jerry Brown after the massive, potentially explosive methane leak at the Aliso Canyon SoCal Gas storage facility in 2015 forced them to endure foul odors and many of the same health problems plaguing people living near the landfill. 

Kruger and his colleagues at Kruger Law Firm have urged Newsom to declare a state of emergency, which would open up funding to help people relocate and escape further injury, he said. 

“We’ve been very, very unhappy about the governor’s response,” said Kruger, whose firm represents 1,800 residents in a lawsuit filed against the landfill last spring. “What we really needed, and what we fought for and lobbied for really hard, was the state of emergency.”

Los Angeles County filed a lawsuit in lieu of declaring a state of emergency.

“The owners and operators of the Landfill have failed to contain or halt this noxious reaction; have failed to protect residents from the terrible effects on local life and health; and have failed to develop a plan that actually fixes this problem,” the county complaint states.

“Chiquita has spared no expense or resource to mitigate the reaction,” said a spokesperson for the Chiquita Canyon Landfill, whose parent company, Waste Connections, made nearly $9 billion last year. “We have taken great steps to provide relief to the community, including approximately $23.5 million in community relief checks, and over 1,750 air purifiers.”

These relief efforts pale in comparison to the need, said Kruger. “The number of lives that this has impacted negatively is so extensive.”

Several of Kruger’s clients have been diagnosed over the past three years with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare cancer with a strong link to benzene. “And you can’t even imagine how many times a week I get a call from a mom of two kids, who asks me, ‘Should I sell my home at a loss? Should I leave? Is this going to end? Should I move my kids’ school?’” Kruger said.

“This is what government is for, to protect people when private institutions are not doing it,” he said. “Except for a few elected officials like Schiavo, the government has really failed its people.”

Jeffords doesn’t understand why state officials aren’t helping her community. 

“We have no state of emergency,” she said. “We have no relocation plan. We haven’t been able to hold this landfill accountable for an evacuation plan. God forbid there was a fire or an earthquake or something extreme that would blow that place up—we would all be blown away.”

Stain on the State

In March, Schiavo testified before the California Air Resources Board in Sacramento, along with Jeffords, Elkins and many of their neighbors. She thanked CARB for its efforts to update the 2010 methane rule, but told them they need to act fast.

“When I found out that the regulations designed to monitor and ensure effective containment of gases haven’t been updated in 15 years I was concerned to say the least,” Schiavo said. Technology and imaging data collection has grown by “leaps and bounds” since then, she said.

That’s why Schiavo authored A.B. 28, the Landfill Fire Safety Act, to require stronger monitoring and early action to control elevated subsurface temperatures, increase state oversight and create a “landfill subsurface fire mitigation account” funded by penalties imposed on noncompliant operators. 

Chiquita employees wear full hazmat suits “looking like they’re going to outer space,” Schiavo said before a California Senate Environmental Quality Committee hearing on the bill in July. “And meanwhile, just yards away, community members, all they can do is close their windows and doors and stay inside.”

On July 16, Jeffords felt particularly ill, but pulled herself together to fly to Sacramento to testify before the Environmental Quality Committee. As she recounted all her symptoms for what seemed like the hundredth time, she broke down.

Williams, the environmental justice activist, comforted Jeffords and stepped in to testify while she regained her composure. 

“We cannot repeat the situation happening at Chiquita,” Williams said. “It is a stain on our state.”

Jeffords rallied to tell the committee members that if they voted for A.B. 28, they’d be telling families like hers that California stands with its people and not with waste companies. 

The following week, Jeffords looked out her bedroom window. Hundreds of million-dollar houses were being built in a partially gated community in the hills behind her house. A nauseating feeling of déjà vu washed over her. How do you tell someone the beautiful house they worked their whole life to buy could ruin everything?