Twenty-five years ago, vandals lit fire to a stockpile of 14 million tires in Hagersville, Ont. The tire fire that burned for 18 days has impacted waste removal legislation and today, the firefighters who worked to put out the fire are fighting for their lives.
The story made international headlines in February 1990.
“It was pretty remarkable when you got there to see everything,” recalls Dennis Friesen, a firefighter from Simcoe County. “There were hundreds of firefighters involved, doing shifts.”
“We all worked together,” said Friesen, “Anybody that could send crews were sending crews to relieve guys because they were there for so long. We did eight hour shifts.”
Friesen now works as the Assistant Chief of the Norfolk County Fire and Rescue Services. “There’s really nothing there now,” Friesen says of the site.
The 20 foot tall piles of tires are all gone. The 12 acre site has been grown over with grass.
“This opened up a whole new regulation as far as tire storage because these tires were just piled up in one big area,” states Friesen.
The Waste Diversion Act was created in 2002 to monitor the recycling of all forms of waste. The Act created the Waste Diversion Organization. However, there was still no organizational body to regulate the clean-up of tires. One year later, the responsibilities of Waste Diversion Ontario was to monitor a new not-for-profit organization, Ontario Tire Stewardship. The Ontario Tire Stewardship was mandated to clean up all of the tire stockpiles across Ontario.
Julie Kwiecinski of Waste Diversion Ontario states that Hagersville has been influential to tire removal legislation.
“If there’s a lesson to be learned it’s the importance of removing tires stockpiles and that has been the focus of Ontario Tire Stewardship throughout the years. They have made some significant progress in that regard,” states Kwiecinski.
In 2009, the Used Tire Program Plan was submitted by Ontario Tire Stewardship. The plan detailed the removal of all tires in Ontario.
“We actually completed all of that clean-up last year, in 2014, to a tune of 1.6 million tires,” states Krista Cassidy, Manager of Promotions and Education at Ontario Tire Stewardship.
Tire stockpiles are a target for arson and the Hagersville fire is just one example of many tire fires across the country. Tires must be collected because they are a fire hazard, but they also contain chemicals that can run-off into the ground or air when burned.
Twenty-five years ago, the air was thick with chemicals as the tires burned. Benzene, styrene and toluene are three cancerous chemicals found in tires. Toluene and Benzene are also in gasoline.
“We refer to them as the ‘dead-enes’,” states Jeri Ottley, a volunteer firefighter in the Health and Safety department of the Fire Fighters Association of Ontario. “Any chemical that ends in ‘ene’ can make you ‘dead-ene’.”
The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) Presumptive Legislation covers the health of firefighters. Firefighters can receive compensation for cancers based on their number of years of service.
Since the Hagersville fire, firefighters have put in claims to the WSIB for cancer noting the “Hagersville fire”, states Ottley.
According to Ottley, the number of firefighters who have died is protected by the Workplace Safetyand Insurance Board privacy act.
“There has been a bit of a cancer cluster around Hagersville and for the firefighters,” states Ottley.
“The hard part is for a firefighter to claim. This is why the presumption legislation came in and Hagersville was part of the push,” explains Ottley.
When firefighters claim an illness to WSIB, they must medically prove what they were exposed to and for how long. They then must medically prove that that exposure can cause the kind of cancer that they have.
“Its especially hard for a firefighter, especially a volunteer to be able to say that with facts,” states Ottley.
The site of the Hagersville fire is still monitored to ensure that run-off water is not contaminated with similar chemicals.
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Documentation 1: LA Times News Article
The documentation is a news article.
I found it in my preliminary research or news stories of the event. I did this research on Google and on the Carleton library archives.
The documentation was helpful because it confirmed that the story was, in fact, a significant topic. The article addressed the severity of the chemicals released at the time. This was a starting point for my piece – 25 years later. My initial questions came from this piece.
Documentation 2: April 2009 Press Release from Ontario Tire Stewardship.
The documentation is a press release.
I found it because I googled: “tires, ministry of environment, recycling, 2009, Ontario.”*
The documentation was helpful because it served as a stepping stone in my research. From this press release I knew which official sources to contact and therefore I could create a chronology of legislative events.
*In my search I did not use quotations but it was in that order and with that punctuation.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-5PvjEHYFLxkoaaexEmb90O1ju1MIWGKpU5pj_xRxo/edit?usp=sharing