I’m nearing Fresh Kills, NY, and I can smell it. The pollution and run-off from the rivers in the area make the sea a septic mess. Add to that the garbage mine’s stench and I may never smell again. Soren, I’ll get you back for this assignment if I have to build a boat to get across the ocean to do it.

The strange thing about an event like this is I can just walk up to it. There’s no media circus, no press area like there would have been ten years ago. I just walked into camp and started talking. Thing is, I can only talk to the people who are on break. It took me four hours to find somebody in charge who would take a moment to speak with me. Facts are these: there’s nine men trapped. They suspect that the collapse is down the tunnel from where they were, so they suspect there is enough air to last for a while down there. The toxicity of the environment however means they have to act fast, or the air they have will be unbreathable.

They spent nearly a day discussing strategies, about 36 hours ago. It needs to be said, I guess that there aren’t any professional miners in the area, and the material is not like mining into bedrock. They were making up safety guidelines as they went. The garbage is certainly not stable, and collapses are not uncommon here. The difference this time is that the collapse is deeper. This particular tunnel was a new experiment to go under the newer trash to get at material that is older, pre-recycling, richer in the materials they wanted.

I should give you a little lay of the land. Any tunnel must be constantly pumped. They have made air canals leading from the entrances of the shafts using pipes and metal of whatever they came up with from the landfill. These pumps were manned by hand to create a constant flow of waste gas out and air in. This is something of the trapped men’s saving grace. They are well reinforced, and the air is being constantly cycled, even more aggressively than when in normal operating mode.

The safety regs they had were never written down, but were an ad hoc combination of experience and guesswork. As they dug tunnels, they would reinforce as best they could. This is what led to this situation. They severely underestimated the weight of the trash above the tunnel. I have yet to get names, other than nicknames, but I will continue reporting from here as I collect the pieces of the puzzle.

The End of the World Times and it’s reporters operate on your donations.

Tags: 2012, Fresh Kills, landfill, New York, Staten Island

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Lori Kim's Blogs, Reporter's Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.