Texas Residents Opposed Permit for Recycling Facility, Recently Destroyed in Massive, Fume-Filled Blaze
While there were plenty of “carbon emissions” from this blaze, there is also a history of air quality complaints related to Silver Creek Materials. prior to the fire.
I was promised that recycling was “green” and helpful to the environment, and that people would love it.
It turns out that I was…misinformed.
However, a major fire broke out at the Silver Creek Materials recycling facility in Fort Worth, Texas, last weekend, generating quite a bit of carbon dioxide and other products of combustion.
The blaze started in a large pile of mulch, pallets, and discarded materials and was rapidly intensified by strong winds, which pushed the flames into a massive pile of tires and other combustibles. This resulted in thick, dark plumes of smoke that were visible for miles across the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Reports of large brush fire came in on Sunday afternoon at the Silver Creek Materials site located in the far west side of town, the Fort Worth Fire Department said in a Facebook post on Monday.
When crews arrived, they found a “large pile of mulch, pallets and discarded materials from residents” on fire. Silver Creek Materials says on its website that it is a recycling, mining, composting and organic products business. The company did not immediately respond to USA TODAY’s request for a comment on Monday.
The fire department said that strong winds fueled the fire, which advanced toward an “extremely large pile of tires and other combustibles.”
“This sent a very large, dark plume of smoke into the air that could be seen for miles,” the department said.
Massive Blaze in Texas! 🚒🔥 Dark plumes of smoke from a Fort Worth recycling facility fire are visible for miles as high winds fan the flames into a mountain of tires. Authorities warn the fire could burn for days. pic.twitter.com/QLeIaLvy9T
— AccuWeather (@accuweather) April 16, 2025
The remote location and the need for a large water supply posed logistical challenges, requiring water shuttling and heavy equipment to move and smother burning debris.
FWFD said the fire itself is about a little more than a mile from Silver Creek Road. [Craig Trojacek, spokesman for the Fort Worth Fire Department] said even though there is water on the property, they needed more resources for the large fire and had to tap into fire hydrants from the road.
“You can see this hose behind me, blue and yellow behind me and things like that, we’ve got probably about 7,000 feet of supply hose running into this area, take s a large volume of water,” explained Trojacek.
More than 50 firefighters from FWFD, Lake Worth, Benbrook and River Oaks fire departments helped.
Trojacek said they believe the fire is pretty much contained to the property and are not using an aerial defense to fight the flames.
Two firefighters were injured, including one who was taken to the hospital. Both suffered non-life-threatening injuries. The cause of the blaze is not yet known.
On Sunday afternoon, a call came into the Fort Worth Fire Department Alarm Office for a large grass/brush fire in the 2200 block of Silver Creek Road (far west side of town).
When crews arrived on scene at the Silver Creek Materials site, they found a large pile of mulch,… pic.twitter.com/Jvp9iHIozn
— Fort Worth Fire Department (@FortWorthFire) April 14, 2025
While I am not entirely sure what burned, I am certain there were plenty of “carbon emissions”.
All joking aside, it was initially thought the fire would take several days to contain. The firefighters did it in 15 hours. Wildfires can spread so easily under the right conditions, it is fortunate this one was stopped before it hit other properties.
But, interestingly, there is a history of air quality complaints related to Silver Creek Materials. In 2019, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) received multiple complaints from residents about “putrid garbage and raw sewage odor” from the facility, with reported health effects such as headaches, eye irritation, and respiratory irritation.
These led to enforcement actions against the company for failing to prevent nuisance odor conditions.
Additionally, local residents and business owners have expressed frustration at a meeting reviewing the approval for the permit for the company to operate a recycling operation at the property in 2023. Their concerns were prescient.
More than 50 people spoke to oppose the permit, with many questioning how they would be notified if a contamination incident or fire were to occur at BAP Kennor’s facility. The state environmental commission said they would investigate any complaints made by residents.
The complaint system hasn’t worked for Robert Sterling, the owner of Silver Creek RV Resort. He and his customers, whose mobile homes overlook the former gravel quarry, have filed complaints about odors at existing recycling facility Silver Creek Materials.
“They go nowhere at all,” Sterling said. “Nothing’s going to happen with complaints. We’ve got to stop this now.”
Of course, the environmental activists in the bureaucracy dismissed reasonable concerns and issued the permit.
This case is a textbook example of how the modern environmental movement operates.
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Comments
What would drastically improve actual environmental policy implementation would be to require each Congressional District to deal with its own hazards. If each.CD was required to produce 75% of their electricity consumption, keep 100% of their non recycled trash have their own recycling facilities for.the rest of it and their own refineries for 75% of their fuel consumption including aviation fuel .. I suspect that would do wonders on the ground for true stewardship. So long as some places ship their trash problems elsewhere and consume fuel or electricity generated in out of sight areas they remain out of mind.
OMG, you think it’s a horrorstory to move district boundaries now…
All the extra capacity helps keep the lights on and by spreading out the generation/production capacity creates a ‘hardening’ of critical infrastructure. Same policies for public lands % and especially for reintroduction of species. Can’t deprive the folks in NYC of the opportunity to view the buffalo and wolves roaming free outside their homes.
The districts can be made fairly static, rather more static than already are, by introducing a few simple reforms.
1. Maintain a 10% +/- count of US Citizens among the CD within each State. Not for apportionment but for the.State drawing the CD after apportionment.
2. CD can have five ‘edges’ not including State/County political boundaries or natural boundaries like rivers, Mountain ranges.
Those two changes + electric generation, refining capacity and trash requirements eliminate lots of mischief in creating the CD. Due to infrastructure requirements capital costs and Citizenship requirements the CD would become more static by necessity. The max ‘line’ requirement works to buttress the stability of CD. Sure gaining or losing a CD requires changes but otherwise once drawn they would stay largely unchanged.
Do you know what economies of scale are? That is a terrible idea.
The economies of scale argument seems ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ when applied to critical infrastructure. Tell you what though, if that’s your true objection then relocate these things to:
1. East.coast to Appalachian, – Connecticut
2. Appalachians to Mississippi River – St Louis
3. Mississippi River to Rockies – Chicago
4. Rockies to Cascades – Denver
5. Cascades to West Coast – San Francisco
There you go, highly concentrated to meet your demand for economies of scale. No State or CD should be without the means to at least deal with most of its own trash/recycling. Exporting those along with exporting their potential environmental hazard issues and those of electricity generation seems more about exporting problems than about creating economies of.scale.
Then there’s the problem of trans!mission lines. Why should someone in State C along the route of a proposed transmission line pushing electricity from State A to State B be forced to grant an easement or surrender land when the bulk of the ‘public use benefit’ is elsewhere? This exact situation is gonna play out.
After thinking about it I would say you’re right except you didn’t go far enough. Hoover Dam crosses the AZ-NV border providing power to multiple STATES (!), not just Congressional Districts, and should not be allowed. Even worse, the Grand Coulee dam in Washington provides power to another country!!! It also makes perfect sense that Las Vegas, which is divided between three CDs, to split its’ trash three different ways.
It was your point about transmission lines that made me see the light. The exact same argument applies to roads and pipelines and communications cables. No road should ever cross a legal boundary and we need to tear apart our road system starting with the interstate highway system. Neither should water or gas pipelines. Every congressional district should also provide its’ own water, grow its’ own food, mine its’ own minerals & metals, pump its’ own oil, have its’ own internet, etc.
You forgot the sarcasm font.
Seriously, how about each State then? Why is it that NIMBY folks in coastal areas and elite enclaves can export their trash and outsource to other places the generation of electricity, fuel refining and so on? Why should other communities bear the potential and real hazards and not these places? Can we at least agree that any ‘special or seasonal fuel’ should be refined in the jurisdiction that requires it and that existing infrastructure right of ways be used instead of totally new routes for electric transmission?
Reductio Ad Absurdum is not sarcasm.
You also have no understanding of DIS-economies of scale. Economies of scale only goes so far and once some entity becomes too big efficiency decreases. Your 5-way division of the US, contrary to what you dishonestly attributed to me, is anti-economy-of-scale.
If fuel refining and power generation had to be local then only the rich could afford to fly or drive or afford to power their homes and businesses.
Got it NIMBY. The enclaves of the elites and Cities with powerful political interests get to outsource the air and groundwater pollution from refining and electrical generation. They can get transmission limes strung across several intermediate States to deliver the electricity they consume but refuse.to create. Tough luck for rural USA but since the moneyed interested sold out US manufacturing and middle class America decades ago there’s probably not much in the way of Jamie Dimon’s vision of running new transmission lines across the Nation not on existing rights of way but with new routes requiring new easements to.support this. No whining if your power goes out b/c some ‘rube’ decided to take it down somewhere out here in ‘fly over Country’.
Ooh, name calling and Marxist class warfare! You couldn’t do better than that?
P.S. if decentralization is good then you would oppose having all infrastructure run through the same right of way.
P.P.S. My parent have a high tension tower in their backyard.
I’d be OK with starting by state. Require each state to generate 75% of their own electricity, refine 50% of their own gasoline (not aviation fuel, though), and take care of 85% of their own refuse – recycle, land fill, whatever.
Then, the states could manage it more discretely, if the people so desired. (And many of them would, though not all.)
LAX, JFK, ATL, CHI and so on pump lots of $ into their communities. Why shouldn’t those communities be refining fuel to support it instead of bringing it from somewhere else?
Leslie, get with the program. “Carbon emissions” are no longer a thing. IMO the attempts to wipe out Tesla and every Tesla car in sight proves the issue was never more than money-laundering graft.
Indeed they were never a thing, the earth warms and cools and I wouldn’t mind it a bit warmer. Plants are being starved of CO2 relative to ancient historical times. It’s nice that they’ve stopped screeching about that at least for a while.
Fires are good as long as they are contained, as this one fortunately was. Now the problem is solved, the earth can heal, the smell is gone, all that stuff is recycled into new forms by the heat.
During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (mile and a half deep in the Gulf of America, leaking oil up to the surface) rather than using Corexit (thanks GWB!) which just embedded the oil droplets permanently into the seawater to flow around the world, they should have lit it and burned it off. Not great but much better than what they did.
“Now the problem is solved, the earth can heal, the smell is gone, all that stuff is recycled into new forms by the heat.”
Yuh, like lead, cyanide, and arsenic. Winchester (below) became a ten-year Superfund site.
It didn’t get worse.
What else are you going to do with lead? Lead does occur naturally in the earth, I read it’s mostly found in the mineral galena, but I don’t know if there’s some “cleaner” way of disposing of it than just returning it to the earth in its metal form.
And wouldn’t cyanide and arsenic mostly evaporate?
What you do with the dangerous elements is to bind them up in something else so that they don’t escape, like encasing spent uranium inside glass and burying it. Turns out tires serve this purpose admirably… until you burn them. And that is exacerbated when you pile a bunch of them all together in a single dump, which everyone does.
As for arsenic, it becomes a major problem in groundwater, as anyone who lives in a historic gold mining district can tell you.
But nobody does that with lead. Cost/benefit/politics tradeoff. In fact we do not encase lead.
“Authorities warn the fire could burn for days.”
Yeah, it’ll be a cakewalk, Brownie. “15 days to slow the spread.”
Once the fire gets into the tires, you’re farked.
In 1983, I drove in to work every day underneath the sun-darkening plume from the Winchester Tire Fire — a plume that, in all justice, saw fit to settle atop Washington, DC — for over nine months.
Tires are notoriously difficult to extinguish once they get going.
It became a popular local redneck attraction. There was even a big yellow “road sign” someone painted on the pavement of I-66 west, saying:
⬆️
TAR
FAR
Since 66 starts in Chicago and runs west, how did the tar far in DC become a subject for roadsign humor?
Oh nvm, I-66 not US-66. You denizens of the beltway can get yer kicks on rt. 66 too!
I wouldn’t worry about those carbon emissions, looks to be far less than those from all of the private jets going to each and every “climate” summit.
Much (or most?) waste isn’t recycle-able or compost-able. Burying it is less bad than dumping in oceans or burning. With surrounding area zoned off limits for residential and agriculture use.
Which brings us back to CD and States forced to deal with their trash v exporting to rural areas. I suspect that if NYC had to follow your landfill guidance within their city limits and bury it that folks would want a higher level of safeguard than currently exist.
which pushed the flames into a massive pile of tires and other combustibles
Pfft. We had tire fires (“tahr fahrs”) in DFW at times when I was growing up there. A giant one out Arlington-way, I think, in the very early 80s (maybe very late 70s). You could see the smoke from one end of 360 to the other end, almost. If you deal with tires, at all, you have that danger.