— As Whien Town Landfill Fire Persists
IPNEWS: The Monrovia City Corporation has alarmed over a looming public health threat with serious challenge to its garbage collection within the city limits of Monrovia due to an ongoing fire breakout at the Landfill in Whien Town, Paynesville.
The Whien Town landfill serves as the ultimate disposal destination for the secondary and primary wastes that are collected from streets and communities in Monrovia and Paynesville respectively.
The Monrovia City Corporation states that it is facing series of difficulties in removing garbage that has been gathered from waste hotspots in Monrovia to its transfer stations which are already filled with a stockpile of garbage.
“Managing this situation over the last months given limited resources continues to cost the MCC a substantial amount in logistics which include PPE’s and over 183-thousand gallons of water used by firefighters till date in an attempt to put out the fire.” A statement from MCC read.
Monrovia produces an estimated 800 tons of domestic solid waste each day, and 45 percent is covered by the formal solid waste collection system, according to the World Bank report released in June 2023. The bank helped establish the facility, which is now over its capacity because of the sheer volume of trash. The facility will close in two years and will be replaced by a new landfill in Cheesemanburg, according to the bank.
The death rate in Whein Town has increased over the last five years, residents say. Residents claimed to have recorded the deaths of three people in October 2023, including a homeless man who scavenged through the dump.
There are no official figures to back these claims, but malaria cases are on the rise in the community, according to the Whein Town Community Clinic. Dumpsites are a breeding ground for mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, environmentalists say.
“People have been dying abruptly of unknown sicknesses,” A resident disclosed.
“We do not know what kind of sickness killed those people because [of] lack of clinics here,” points out Morris. “Look, the rotten water from the garbage [is] passing all under our houses, which has finished contaminating all of our drinking water.”
Monrovia former City Mayor Jefferson Koijee blamed his predecessor for choosing the wrong location for a solid waste site, which has exposed the inhabitants to environmental threats.
“Once you have a landfill in the center of the very town where people are close to the garbage, you will have a lot of environmental consequences,” Koijee said.
“If I were mayor at the time and was in decision-making, I do not think I would have selected the current place as an option for a suitable landfill. We are in empathy with the Whein Town community and understand that issues raised by them are all legitimate. We work with them in addressing those concerns they are raising by sharing mosquito nets and erecting water kiosks until we have a successful closure.” Monrovia former city Mayor stated.
Former Acting Monrovia Mayor Mary Broh, who headed the MCC at the time the garbage disposal facility was built, has since refused to comment on former city Mayor Koijee’s assertions.
MCC should have taken into consideration the impacts of the garbage facility on Whein Town before building the site, says Dr. Emmanuel Urey, current EPA Executive Director, and environmentalist with One Life Liberia, a land rights and environmental advocacy firm. The government of Liberia should have avoided the Whein Town situation by putting into place strict environmental safeguards for different types of waste, he adds.
“Waste is difficult to deal with, and if we are not careful, an entire population could be wiped out,” explains Dr. Urey. “The most dangerous waste is the medical waste. The reason is because it has many radioactive materials, which cause sickness, including skin burns. And when it enters into [the] water source, it affects people, mostly women of child-bearing age. Even if you are not drinking the water, but you are eating fish from the contaminated creek or river, it affects you through the fish.”
Waste dissolves into the soil and is washed into the underground water and other water bodies, which then make their way to people, according to Dr. Urey. Measures must be implemented to minimize dangers.
“There should be a method of separating medical wastes from solid wastes. You cannot dump medical waste to the same site as solid waste because it is very radioactive and should not be dumped at the same location,” he says. “Radioactive wastes are byproducts from different types of chemicals used in certain procedures, like X-ray and other equipment in hospitals. With regular awareness of how water and airborne diseases are spread from person to person, like in the case of Ebola, the population would be educated to avoid diseases.”
Former EPA Executive Director Nathaniel Blama, agrees with Dr. Urey, saying that the dumpsite has outlived its usefulness and should be dissolved.
“In the case of Whein Town and what went wrong was that, first of all, the landscape was not conducive because it was not prepared well,” Blama tells FrontPage Africa. “Water was seeping through the soil and contaminating the drinking sources, but people had already started dumping there before they went in to fix it.”
Blama says he hope that the mistakes made will not be repeated in the Cheesemanburg landfill expected to be built.
“What we are trying to do in Cheesemanburg for the solid program to be better is to follow all of the steps so that we do not have the structure we now have in Whein Town,” he says. He notes that the government sidestepped some environmental procedures in response to an “emergency” after the previous garbage facility in Fiamah was destroyed.
