2021-05-26

Multiple emergency crews sent to battle Sherwood landfill fire

Emergency crews spent close to five hours extinguishing a 60-by-30-metre area of trash at the Kaizer Meadow Solid Waste Management Facility in Sherwood that went up in flames May 17.

Volunteer firefighters were back out to the landfill site, off Kaizer Meadow Road, north of Chester, just after 6:30 a.m. the next morning when workers discovered a section of smouldering trash. Water was applied to problematic area as workers used heavy equipment to excavate. A blanket of fire-smothering foam was used to cover the area to ensure of no immediate flare-ups before firefighters cleared from the call before 10 a.m.

The May 17 and 18 fire incidents were the first such alarms Chester fire crews have had to deal at the municipally-owned landfill in a couple of years, fire chief Everett Hiltz noted.

"Landfill fires are inherently dangerous with the chemicals that are coming off what is burning," he told LighthouseNOW in a telephone interview.

"The goal is to keep ourselves out of the smoke. If we have to be in the smoke [we're] wearing our [cylinders containing breathable air] to protect our lungs and apply water until the excavator can pull [stuff] apart and deal with it."

The initial alarm came in just before 2 p.m. May 17 when employees reported a fire in the active open cell where garbage is brought in. The surface fire grew to engulf a 12-by-18-metre section but, Hiltz said, spiked to "double to triple" that size by the time he arrived on scene. "Small minor explosions," likely caused by spray cans or other pressurized vessels, took place at the incident, the fire chief said.

An image posted online by the Municipality of Chester showed a swath of low level flames and thick black smoke up in the air of a backdrop of blue sky.

Extra help from multiple volunteer fire departments was summoned to extinguish the fire, part of a mutual aid agreement for incidents in that part of Chester's fire service district.

"We don't even put personnel in the open cell. We do everything we can from master streams," Hiltz said of using high-capacity water mounted on a truck when dealing with the landfill incident. "We're not actually trekking through the cell; we leave the excavator for that."

The major concern is protecting the cell liners the municipality uses, which can be very expensive to replace.

There were no injuries, nor any evacuations.

It is unlikely investigators will find a cause of the fire because "there's any number of possibilities" that could have started it or led to its ignition, Hiltz said. There was lightening in the area at the time but discarded batteries, a ruptured seal of a disposed chemical, even sunlight reflecting off metal or glass could have contributed to the incident.

"There's the potential of light refraction form a source that could focus it down to cause a burn," Hiltz noted.

He credited municipal staff for better managing the open face cells by creating conditions that prevent more and larger fires.

"In the years past they have had massive sections of the cell open, but now they're keeping layers of clay on top of the garbage so that anything that could possibly happen is smothered because it's buried."

Both incidents prompted temporary closures of the facility property until fire crews completed their work.