Firefighters were called out to the Mission landfill on the weekend after a pile of refuse caught fire.
On Sunday night, at approximately 6:30 p.m., a call came in reporting a lot of smoke at the landfill.
Crews from Firehall #2 attended the scene and put out the blaze. However, because it is a garbage fire, it is difficult to tell if all the hot spots have been extinguished.
“Over the course of the evening, it rekindled so firefighters returned on Monday morning to put out the hot spots,” explained David Butterworth, the district chief of station 2.
Butterworth said the initial fire was approximately 20 by 50 feet in size with flames showing.
“But because it was in the landfill, there were no exposures, no danger to the public. It wasn’t going anywhere, there was nothing it could have hurt,” he said.
While there is no official cause at this point Butterworth said there is a “pretty strong theory” about what happened.
He said open garbage is crushed by huge machines and the weight of the machines appears to have cracked open a sealed container, like a tool box.
He speculated that batteries or fluorescent lights were inside and caused the surrounding garbage to ignite
“It does sound like it’s due to improperly disposed of materials.”
Because the fire only burned garbage, there was no dollar loss caused by the incident.