Fire at UK tyre recycling operation causes 'massive smoke' but little damage

By Liz White, ERJ staff

Newark, UK-Some 13 fire appliances and 65 firefighters tackled a blaze which started around midday Saturday 8 Oct in a 250-tonne pile of shredded truck tyres at UK recycler Charles Lawrence International.

But despite taking till Monday to extinguish completely, the fire cause little damage to the facilities at the Newark site, and the recycling firm said it expects to be back to full operation by the middle of the week.

The massive smoke, typical of burning rubber, meant two of Charles Lawrences' buildings adjacent to the fire had to be evacuated and trains on the nearby main line had to be slowed, said Andy Bettison, station officer at Nottingham Fire & Rescue Services headquarters in Nottingham.

"I could see the smoke from about eight miles away," said Bettison. It took the fire service 5 hours to get the 'main burn' controlled and two days to put the fire out completely.

"Whilst the fire looked dramatic, because of the amount of flames and smoke generated, it caused only minor superficial damage to the plant and machinery," commented Roger Hicks, managing director of Charles Lawrence, in a statement on the fire.

The group "can operate two thirds of the plant" and hopes "it will be fully operational by mid-week," Hicks added.

It was shortly before midday on Saturday when plant workers discovered the fire in the firm's tyre-shred stockpile-which is at one side of its tyre recycling plant. They immediately called the fire service and attempted to contain the fire-having been trained to deal with this type of incident.

The cause of the fire has yet to be established, but the company has launched "an intensive investigation, together with the fire service forensic team," said Hicks.

A concern at the time was potential environmental damage resulting from this sort of fire, with the run-off water from extinguishing the blaze being contaminated, Bettison said. Fortunately the company "had an excellent interceptor system," of drainage, which contained all the run-off: the fire crews could simply pump it into tanks and remove it, he added.

The area was also, "bunded-in the sense that it had three sides contained by protective mounds," Bettison added. The only difficulty the fire crews found was that the water supply to the site was somewhat limited. They had to transport water to the site, since the initial aim was to "get as much water onto the fire to stop the smoke," Bettison said.

Charles Lawrence is one of the UK's major recycler of truck tyres, processing about 15 000 tonnes of truck tyres annually, or 350 000 casings, and producing some 10 000 tonnes of rubber granulate. The firm uses ambient-temperature granulation which it says gives rise to, "no fumes and heat generation is limited."

The group also makes sports and playground surfaces and other products, and supplies recycling machinery to the tyre recycling sector.