A fire broke out at around 4:20 p.m. near an unloading platform of a municipal and non-hazardous industrial waste (NHIW) landfill. An employee driving a transfer vehicle gave the alert and began moving the smoking waste to an inert area. Other employees arrived with five fire extinguishers and covered the 100 m² cell with soil. Thick white smoke rose up from the soil. A team of fire-fighters, alerted at 4:50 p.m., doused the waste with dozens of cubic metres of water. The waste was then stirred and re-covered with soil by the landfill’s employees.  The scene was monitored by fire-fighters until 8:00 p.m. and by the landfill’s employees for the rest of the night. The engineered liner of the adjacent cell was not damaged. The extinguishing water was collected and treated by the cell’s leachate collection system.

Two days later, the operator of the landfill once again noticed smoke emanations after a rubbish truck was unloaded. It had the waste isolated and realised that the very same truck had delivered industrial wastewater sludge just before the previous fire.

The consignor of the waste stated that drums of calcium oxide may have been mistakenly loaded into the rubbish truck sent to the landfill. The consignor issued in-house safety rules, informed the plant’s employees and posted the rules.