Pollution
Humain
Environnement
Economique

Fire broke out at 11:40 pm on a Saturday night over 200 m² of an underground storage cell of wastes packaged into bales at a household waste storage site. The thermal camera surveillance images that has detected a temperature rise were not relayed to the video monitoring station. At midnight, a neighbour phoned the on-call desk to report “rubbish bins on fire”. The on-call agent verified the most recent incoming thermal camera images on his phone, observed abnormally high temperature on the cell (T>150°C) and alerted both the emergency services and his supervisor, who requested his presence on site. Fire-fighters, arriving on the scene at 12:40 am, sprinkled the cell from the site’s fire water network and opened the grating to access the adjacent lake should additional water be needed. The fire source is extinguished at around 4 am, subsequent to which the fire crew left the site and facility employees covered the cell with earth using a power shovel and loader. The 300 m³ of extinction water were confined inside the cell thanks to a plug and then pumped into the leachate lagoon before being conveyed to the site’s treatment plant. Incoming waste deliveries resumed 72 hours after the incident.

Until 2 pm the day prior, 28 t of composting debris were buried on-site, and an analysis of video tape revealed this to be the origin of the outbreak, either by self-ignition of the wastes or by biogas self-ignition. Failure to transmit camera images to the video monitoring station was caused by a transmission network outage. The facility operator deployed an alarm system for on-call personnel in the event of a down network, along with verification by the video monitoring station that high temperature alarms had been successfully relayed. The operator also produced a fire emergency plan.