Jeff Colbourne
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jun 24/98) - Fire crews and heavy-equipment workers were kept busy Monday battling a stubborn blaze at the city dump.

Crews were called to the site around 9:30 a.m. and took six hours to contain the blaze with the help of truck-load upon truck-load of gravel used to cover the burning processed garbage bales.

"This is the residential garbage. This stuff was fly-infested, rotting and stunk to high-heaven," said deputy fire chief Mike Lowing.

"There was no way this kind of fire can be extinguished because those bales burn like mega-large-size briquettes, so our job was to keep the fire down so that the heavy equipment, which really put the fire out, could do the bulk of the work," said Lowing.

The fire spread about 15 metres into the buried bales and moved around under the surface, flaring up in different spots.

Crews used about 20 tankers of water -- each contain 11,000 litres -- to douse the garbage fire.

"Most of the water was very ineffective. It just kept the flames down. At one point we had three hose lines working at one area and it just kept burning away."

Compressed cans in the bales that detonated also made it interesting for firefighters stationed on the bales.

"They go boom, a big fireball and everybody scrambles for cover," said Lowing.

This is the third bale fire this year at the dump.

"It's ironic that they've gone years without a fire and we've had two in a very short period of time because they do a very good job of keeping things segregated."

The cause of the fire had not been determined.