City Firefighters Battle Landfill Fire
Posted on: Sunday, 16 April 2006, 18:00 CDT
By Joann Deluna, Valley Morning Star, Harlingen, Texas
Apr. 15--HARLINGEN -- City firefighters battled a landfill fire approximately half a mile long and a city block wide Saturday evening for several hours without any success in extinguishing the blaze.
Firefighters responded to the fire at the city landfill on the corner of Loop 499 and Farm Road 106 shortly before 5 p.m.
By 8:30 p.m., firefighters remained on the scene and continued to douse the fire with water.
"We'll probably be here until the end of our shift at 8 in the morning," Capt. Dan Warner of the fire department said Saturday night. "The original crew is still here and they haven't had dinner."
The cause of the fire was not immediately known.
Warner said the smoke from the fire was not a hazard to drivers or to Valley International Airport.
"The smoke is not a problem for traffic," he said.
Four engines, a brush truck and an incident care unit responded to the fire, Warner said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also provided a crop duster plane to help smother the blaze.
The landfill was still on fire after the plane made five passes to drop water.
"The water was to keep the fire from spreading," Warner said.
Landfill workers and firefighters also created breaks in the landfill to keep the fire from spreading to areas they had already extinguished, Warner said.
Windy conditions only spread the fire farther, he said.
Warner said he did not know how long it would take to extinguish the fire.
He said he could not recall the last landfill fire at the same location, but said it took about a week to extinguish the last time.
"We'll be here all night, depending on how far we get," Warner said.
The American Red Cross was to arrive on the scene to provide the firefighters with food, Warner said.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Valley Morning Star, Harlingen, Texas
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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Source: Valley Morning Star (Harlingen, Texas)
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