One Sunday at around 7:30 a.m., a suspicious odour was detected at the solid recovered fuel (SRF) storage area of a non-hazardous waste sorting, transit and treatment facility. A 1 m² area of dry matter was found to be slowly burning. The firefighters and employees were alerted. Attempts to drench the area with the hose reel system proved unsuccessful, and upon their arrival, the firefighters decided to remove the burning SRF with a claw to prevent the fire spreading to the rest of the SRF. But whilst this operation was under way, flames rose up and the fire spread to the steel frame. The ventilation system, which was in operation, accelerated the spreading of the flames. The employees shut down the ventilation system. The firefighters and employees extinguished the flames with water and foam. The site was monitored for flare-ups until 5:00 p.m. and the alert was lifted at 5:30 p.m. Employees continued removing waste from the area while dousing and monitoring it for three days. The boiler and ventilation system were kept shut down during this period. The only material damage was to the wiring harness on a light.

The thermal imaging camera already installed proved to be ineffective for this type of fire.

Since the accident, the operator has:

• made a drum of foam compound available in the SRF storage area;
• installed aspirating smoke detectors;
• written instructions on the procedure to follow the event of a fire in the SRF building and transmitted this information to its employees and firefighters;
• increased the reliability of the SRF disposal channels in order to avoid the presence of too much waste on site at one time (looking for new regular channels to bypass maintenance shutdowns at cement plants).