JACKSON, Miss.—Tanya Spann was working the cash register at a South Jackson gas station on Aug. 17 when she first heard sirens. Less than a mile down the road, a massive fire had erupted at a tire recycling plant, sending pillars of flame and coils of black smoke into the clear summer sky. The blaze was so ferocious that gas station customers stopped filling their tanks to take in the scene from their cars.
“They just parked and watched,” Spann said, adding that the fire was the fiercest—and smokiest—she’s seen in her many years as a South Jackson resident.
Over a week later, the Jackson Fire Department has finally subdued the fire at the Mississippi Tire Recycling building near E. McDowell Road, reducing the once-towering blaze to piles of smoldering rubber and rubble. But with smoke levels mounting in the days after the fire broke out, authorities tasked with protecting Mississippians from environmental threats have been focused on air quality concerns.
Though they don’t occur as often as other types of fires, tire fires can cause widespread environmental damage and create major headaches for first responders. Burning rubber releases oil, gas and other compounds, providing a constant fuel source for the fire and making it exceptionally hard to extinguish. That extends the window for emissions to enter air, soil and water. In some cases, fires at facilities like the one in South Jackson have lasted for months.
“If you set one tire on fire, it’s real hard to put out,” Jackson Fire Department Assistant Fire Chief Patrick Armon said in an Aug. 20 interview. “Now, just imagine: Instead of one tire, there’s 10,000 of them. That’s what’s going on right now.”
Throughout the past week, fire department officials have worked with state and national agencies to ensure emissions from the fire don’t threaten public safety. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and Environmental Protection Agency have been monitoring air quality around the tire recycling plant, focusing on nearby businesses and residential areas west of Interstate 55 that may have been affected by the fumes.
Based on its air monitoring, MDEQ has stated consistently that emissions from the fire remain below “action levels,” meaning they do not present a danger to surrounding communities.
“No amount of smoke is good,” Caleb Covington, a member of MDEQ’s emergency response team, told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 20. “But the community monitoring that we’ve had in place during the entire event is below action levels, and in fact it’s mostly non-detect for everything we’re monitoring for.”
Covington said MDEQ is keeping a close eye on particulate matter—a mix of airborne particles released during fires (often too small to be seen without a microscope) that can settle in the lungs when inhaled. Exposure to these particles can trigger or worsen respiratory illnesses like asthma and impact cardiovascular health.
Independent experts told the Mississippi Free Press that monitoring particulate matter is especially critical during tire fires, since emissions include carbon-containing compounds that have been linked to cancer and other serious conditions.
“When oil in a tire is burned, that’s getting released into the air,” said Courtney Roper, an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi specializing in environmental toxicology. “Some of those (compounds) are known to be carcinogenic or teratogenic, meaning they could have potential impacts to a developing fetus.”
To determine whether particulate matter from the South Jackson fire poses a threat to public health, MDEQ is relying on widely used air quality standards like the Wildfire Smoke Guidelines, which help establish “safe levels of particulate matter and other pollutants,” according to an Aug. 23 fact sheet. The agency has performed frequent air quality readings along Terry Road—a residential area west of the fire—and set up a stationary monitor at a UPS trucking site next to the recycling plant.
Speaking with the Mississippi Free Press, Damon Small, a UPS employee who works at the nearby facility and does deliveries in South Jackson, said he wasn’t overly concerned about fire emissions as long as his exposure levels remain low.
“Short-term, I don’t think it will be a problem,” the delivery driver said in an Aug. 19 interview. “But long-term, I’m like, ‘What’s this smoke going to do to me, especially when you’re working in this heat?’”
MDEQ said the agency would continue its community air monitoring around the recycling plant until the fire was fully extinguished.
Monitoring air quality will remain important as long as members of the public continue to notice emissions, outside experts said.
“The basic fundamental line is that if you smell burning rubber, you are breathing air pollution,” American Lung Association Environmental Health Director Kevin Stewart told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug 23. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily harmful.”