Residents in a Quebec town say they are fed up with the toxic environment they are living in just as firefighters have begun battling an underground garbage fire that's been burning for months.

The fire has only added to the ire of the people in Cantley, about 16 km north of Ottawa, who have also had to put up with toxic gas emissions, likely coming from the same garbage dump. Residents blame the Quebec government for mismanaging the dump.

"We started to compare notes, we figure we've been poisoned for years," says Roland Davis. He says the dump is full of things that shouldn't be in a dry material dump, things that are poisoning the area around his house, just a few hundred metres away.

"Tires, dead animals, paint, aerosols, anything in the world that could possibly be in there is in there."

The dump has been operating for 15 years and Quebec's Ministry of the Environment concedes that its owners mismanaged it for much of that time. The ministry also admits inspectors didn't visit the dump to make sure it was following the rules.

The dump continues to operate even though it was ordered closed in 1996. Eventually, the Quebec government overturned the closure. In 2001 the Quebec Ministry of the Environment ordered it cleaned up but that didn't happen, either.

The ministry learned about the emission of hydrogen sulphide, a potentially lethal gas, last August but didn't inform residents until February 2005.

"People have felt symptoms, they have nausea, they have headaches, difficulty sleeping," says Dr. Lucie Lemieux from the province's Health Department. "Once they move out of the area, they'll come back to their original health."

The province isn't offering to move people out of the area and residents say they can't find buyers for their homes.

Meanwhile, authorities are recommending the people living in the 69 homes near the dump leave temporarily until workers get the fire and emissions under control. There are still no plans to close the dump, which is still trucking in garbage as the fire burns underneath.

Officials say closing the dump would cost too much money because of the expense of disposing of all the garbage properly and finding a new landfill for the area.