SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Firefighters were called out to douse persistent hot spots at the dump over the weekend, three months after a major blaze there.

"(The underground) hot spots have been ongoing for a while and we were hoping that the covering material would have smothered it," said Bruce Underhay, manager of the Solid Waste Facility.

"But it just kept continuing and it actually started spreading and breaking open more, so on Friday morning we decided to excavate it and extinguish it fully.

"It was in an old construction area, so there was a lot of air space which I guess is what kept it smoldering since September," he said.

Extinguishing the remaining fire was completed by 4 p.m. Sunday. Underhay said the depth of some hot spots ranged from four to twelve feet.

"The problem area was maybe 100 feet long, maybe 75 feet wide," he said. "I would guess that we removed maybe 100 truck loads of material."

Underhay said he was reasonably sure the particular area had been extinguished but could not guarantee there were not more hot pockets elsewhere.

"It's possible, but like I say, the area where we were working on, we're pretty sure that's been fully extinguished," he said.

Darcy Hernblad, deputy fire chief, said lingering hot spots were not uncommon in landfill fires.

"It's not an unusual thing to have a little bit of burning activity underground at a landfill sight with all the different materials that are in there," he said.

"It's easy to suppress a fire, but you might have missed a tiny little hot spot that just rekindles after a few months - it's not unusual."

Using a backhoe, facility staff dug up the volatile material, and a 2,500 gallon tanker and two firefighters remained at the scene to continuously douse the unearthed fire.

"As they would dig it up, of course it introduces a lot more air, and it rekindles as they're looking for those hot spots," he said.

"It's not really a true emergency, but as they were digging it up trying to find the little hot spots, our firefighters were there just spraying down anything that would start to rekindle."

It is unclear how or if the incident will effect dump operations. Dennis Kefalas, director of public works and engineering, could not be reached by press time.