A dump site in the tourist of city Acapulco is an environmental hazard which requires urgent action, environmental officials have said.

The Guerrero Environment Ministry, Semaren, has requested that municipal authorities in Acapulco take immediate action: state Environment Minister Ángel Almazán Juárez said that new emergency infrastructure should be built.

The open air solid waste disposal site receives 800 tonnes of trash every day, which increases to 1,000-1,200 tonnes per day in the holiday season.

Almazán said that work was required to prevent the accumulation of waste liquids, which is made worse during rainy season. He added that soil and water studies would be conducted to determine the level of contamination created by the landfill.

However, Almazán assured that the dump site wasn’t full and that problems were due to poor administration. “The personnel working in the landfill do not properly compact the waste and do not cover it with biological product so that bad odors and runoff of waste liquid … are avoided,” he said.

Of the 104 hectares of the landfill, only 40% is being used by the municipality, the news site Amapola reported.

Almazán added that waste liquids had been cleared on a third of the site on Wednesday and accused the previous government of Acapulco of administrating the dump site poorly. He said the ministry had recommended the current Acapulco government contract more staff and buy new machinery for the site.

Environmental officials started to carry out supervision at the site due to complaints on social media, according to Amapola.

“The Acapulco landfill is overflowing. Waste liquids are flooding the place and there are going to be underground streams,” the leader of the Citizens Movement (MC) in Acapulco, Ramiro Solorio Almazán, wrote on Twitter in one complaint.

State authorities declared a health alert in Acapulco in August last year due to the accumulation of garbage dumped on streets and problems at dump sites. That alert was lifted in May.

With reports from Amapola