Fireball erupts as London recycling centre engulfed in flames
A huge fireball erupted above a recycling centre in London on Sunday (11 January) night.
Video footage shows thick plumes of smoke billowing across the skyline, as a fiery blaze can be seen behind a row of houses in Southall.
Around 60 firefighters spent three hours tackling the blaze on Johnson Street, London Fire Brigade said. No injuries were reported and the cause of the fire is not yet known.
We've had at least two other recycling centre fires since New Year's Eve -
Nottinghamshire council misses bin collections after huge recycling site fire
Alconbury Hill recycling centre fire was accidental
Alconbury Hill recycling centre fire was accidental
7 comments:
Historically there definitely was a sense that recycling centres always seemed to catch fire when the operators were struggling financially. But I suspect the current spate of them has more to do with disposable vapes, which all contain a lithium battery which is quite capable of being the cause of a fire, if it goes into thermal runaway. There's plenty of videos on youtube of people showing what can happen when a vape battery gets punctured or overheated. And hundreds of millions of these things are being bought every year. To be honest I'd say the chance any given rubbish recycling plant will catch fire at some point has to be approaching one pretty rapidly, there's so many vapes disposed of incorrectly.
What's a "recycling centre"? Do they mean a tip?
Sobers - this may be what was really behind the disposable vape ban, although I don't know how effective it has been. Effective or not, lithium batteries are so common anyway that significant numbers are bound to end up in recycling centres.
Lithium batteries seem to end up in landfill sites too, as they have also been cited as the cause of fires there.
dearieme - we still call ours "the tip" although the one near to where I grew up in the fifties was just called "the dump".
Do scrap yards still exist? There used to be one on my route to school; his stock spilled out onto the public side of his fence (naughty boy!) which gave us the pleasure of clambering about on it on the way home.
dearieme - they still exist round here, quite a few of them I believe, taking in scrapped cars, metals or various reclaimed material such as doors and decorative architectural bits and bobs.
Quite a few Architectural Salvage/ Reclaim Yards around here; a interesting place to browse and buy an old cast iron fireplace to restore what was ripped out last century. There is are even a few scrap yards full of old cars, alas you can no longer take your own tools and remove the parts needed to keep your old banger on the road for another MOT, elfin safety pah!
djc - some antiques centres are like that, always worth a rummage. A work colleague once told me of a scrapyard near London which had an old army tank - to deter intruders perhaps.
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