Kansas City area residents warned of air quality problems from KCK recycling center fire
Officials urged residents in the Kansas City area to stay indoors if they could could see smoke coming from a fire at a recycling plant in Kansas City, Kansas.
The Johnson County Health Department said around 10:45 a.m. that the blaze at Advantage Metals in the 1100 block of South 12th Street was “potentially impacting air quality in northern Johnson County.”
Fire officials in Kansas City, Kansas, said the blaze could be seen for miles. The center’s piles of automobiles, refrigerators and propane tanks, some still containing fuel, fed the fire.
Air monitors in Kansas City, Kansas, showed elevated levels of potentially harmful pollutants known as particulate matter.
The environmental justice organization CleanAirNow installed 20 monitors in recent years across the Kansas City metro. A monitor in the Armourdale neighborhood had a reading of 174 about five hours after the blaze was reported at the facility. The monitors use an index that measures air quality on a scale of 0 to over 300. A reading of 174 is considered unhealthy.
“That high of a number is a bad number when you are breathing it in,” said Rayan Makarem, CleanAirNow’s climate policy advocate.
The previous recent weekly average for that site was 47.
Numbers around 30 are considered acceptable, Makarem said. The monitors measure particulate matter 2.5, which can be inhaled and cause respiratory problems as well as environmental damage, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Makarem urged the EPA and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment “to be more stringent in the enforcement of regulations.”
As firefighters battled the blaze, they encountered a problem, according to Assistant Chief Scott Schaunaman, a spokesman with the Kansas City, Kansas, Fire Department.
The closest fire hydrant was 1,000 feet away. The next closest hydrant was over a mile away.
The EPA was called at 10 a.m. Friday by KDHE to support the state’s emergency management department’s request for air monitoring support, said EPA spokesman Kellen Ashford.
“EPA is deploying an on-scene coordinator to integrate into Incident Command with Kansas City, Kansas Fire Department and Wyandotte County Emergency Management,” he said. “EPA personnel are currently working to deploy air monitoring to support the response.”
Makarem said the location of the recycling plant has a history of redlining where low-income communities have been exposed to polluting sources.
The ZIP code is considered disadvantaged housing by the Council on Environmental Quality. The group’s screening tool, created through an executive order issued by President Joe Biden, shows the area is burdened by legacy pollution.
“The location of Advantage Metals in the Armourdale neighborhood has always been a problem,” Makarem said.
“It’s just another one of those incidences where the community gets affected, we get to breathe all this toxic air.”
This story was originally published May 19, 2023 at 12:06 PM.