COEUR d'ALENE - As if picking through garbage didn't have surprises enough, imagine if there were something toxic waiting within. Or poisonous. Or flammable. These concerns are always on the minds of staff at the Kootenai County Solid Waste Department, said Director Roger Saterfiel, as local transfer stations often encounter hazardous materials that should never have made it into the garbage.

COEUR d'ALENE - As if picking through garbage didn't have surprises enough, imagine if there were something toxic waiting within.

Or poisonous. Or flammable.

These concerns are always on the minds of staff at the Kootenai County Solid Waste Department, said Director Roger Saterfiel, as local transfer stations often encounter hazardous materials that should never have made it into the garbage.

"It's pretty much an everyday possibility," Saterfiel said. "You don't know what people are dumping off. You don't know what the reaction might be."

Especially when items have turned up like mercury, World War II mortar rounds, pipe bombs and a grenade.

"Let your imagination run, we've pretty much seen it all," Saterfiel said.

But just as dangerous are the seemingly innocuous household cleaners and pool chemicals, he said, which pose the risk of flammability or mixing with other fluids to create a toxic result.

"It's the unknown factor that is really the big player here," he said. "We're never quite sure what's going to happen."

Sometimes emergencies happen.

Employees who sift through dumped items looking for recyclables have sometimes landed in the hospital after being exposed to harmful materials, Saterfiel said.

Like last month, said Ramsey station manager Doug Goodwin, when an employee at the Prairie Transfer Station was exposed to a chemical that spilled out of a garbage pile.

"He (the employee) had a little difficulty breathing," Goodwin said.

These occurrences are challenging for emergency providers who can't be sure what substance was behind the problem, he added, though the employee recovered.

A prevalent issue a few years ago was staff happening upon waste from meth labs, Goodwin said, like large quantities of drain cleaners and white gas.

There were also large bags of matches - which he believes were leftovers from meth makers taking the red phosphorous from match heads - that lit up quickly with the help of any friction.

"It was at least a weekly thing," Goodwin said. "Picture a big plastic lawn bag full of matches. Imagine driving over it with a full front loader, and the whole thing ignites."

The Solid Waste Department provides staff training each year on screening for dangerous items, Saterfiel said, but they can't catch everything.

Citizens can help by utilizing the county's free hazardous waste disposal days, he said.

Both the Ramsey and Prairie transfer stations open facilities twice a week to accept hazardous waste, most of which is barreled and shipped to a hazardous waste landfill in Oregon.

Any paint collected is sprayed over the landfill, Saterfiel added, to fulfill legal requisites of covering the waste each day. The combination of hydroseeder and paint is thinner than dirt, he explained, which leaves more room for garbage.

The Ramsey Transfer Station collects hazardous waste from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturday. The Prairie station takes hazardous materials at the same times on Fridays and Saturdays.

Saterfiel had a run-in with strange materials himself a couple decades ago, he said, when the county Solid Waste Department had yet to hear about hazardous material training.

Seeing smoke pouring out the back of a garbage truck, Saterfiel remembered, he and several others rushed to the vehicle with a fire hose.

"The reaction back then was, you see smoke, you get a fire hose," he said.

But it wasn't any old garbage fire.

The instant the smoke reached the workers, he said, they passed out, six people at once.

After being rushed to the hospital, they could only sit and wait under observation while doctors tried to determine what they had been exposed to.

"We sat down there for five or six hours waiting to see whether anything was going to happen," said Saterfiel, now fine, as far as he knows. "That's the real scary part, wondering, 'Did I breathe something that's going to kill me today? Or is it going to have an effect 20 or 30 years from now?"

A list of potential hazardous materials are listed on the Solid Waste website at: www.co.kootenai.id.us/departments/solidwaste/hazmat.asp.

"We'd really like people to bring stuff in if they don't know what it is and let us check it out," Saterfiel said. "Let us decide."