The executive director of Montgomery County’s men’s homeless shelter says the Rockville facility will remain closed until the middle of this month when federal inspectors can determine whether methane burning at a nearby closed landfill is creating a public health risk.
The county’s only full-time men’s shelter had to evacuate last month after residents became sick due to vibrations that were occurring from the burning of methane at the landfill next to it on Gude Drive.
About 65 men were forced to relocate to an overflow shelter three miles away in Gaithersburg that is typically used during the winter, when the shelter expands its capacity to house about 200 men during the cold months, said Susie Sinclair-Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless.
About 30 administrative staff, she said, evacuated the shelter in January when the vibrations first began to occur.
The landfill in an industrial park area of Rockville is no longer used and burns methane using a series of pipes and an internal combustion engine. Decaying material in landfills creates the gas.
Prior to 2018, the county had converted some of the methane into energy to be used in the electrical grid. But since the methane flares went into full-time use last year, the vibrations have gradually been increasing since December, Sinclair-Smith said, and in January the administrative staff began to feel the vibrations and evacuated one month later.
Sinclair-Smith said the residents would be displaced from the shelter until inspectors from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control, evaluated the facility in a couple of weeks. The inspectors, she said, must inspect the shelter site, interview staff from the administrative office and take measurements of the landfill flares.
Mary Anderson, a spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, said the federal health inspectors are scheduled June 13 and 14 to determine whether there is a health risk to the shelter.
“We don’t know if it’s a hazard or what the hazard is. There hasn’t been an evaluation to say what happens,” she said.
Sinclair-Smith said the 65 men who had to evacuate on May 17 were some of the “most vulnerable” homeless people in the county, meaning several were wheelchair-bound or had “fragile mental health conditions.” They evacuated within two hours, leaving most of their belongings. Sinclair-Smith said plans were being made over the weekend to retrieve their belongings.
The closing was first reported last week by The Washington Post.
Sinclair-Smith said county officials did not initially inform shelter staff of the change in methane burning procedures last year.
Sinclair-Smith said since January, the shelter has discussed their concerns about the flares with county officials. The shelter has spent $55,000 on relocating the administrative offices, and those costs are expected to be reimbursed by the county. But she said she would have appreciated more warning about the change in landfill procedures.
“I would think that they might have been able to anticipate that this might have happened,” she said.
Dan Schere can be reached at Daniel.schere@moco360.media
