MARGAO
Fire broke out yet again at the Sonsodo waste management site in the wee hours of Thursday, once again bringing to the fore the susceptibility of the waste dumping site to fire incidents.
The early Thursday morning fire incident comes in less than two months since a raging fire had engulfed dry waste at Sosnodo in the wee hours of November 24 last year.
This time round, the green waste dump caught fire at Sonsodo, even as the fingers of suspicion is pointed to miscreants either playing mischief or with the intention to dispose the piled up waste inside the complex alongside the road leading to the plant.
It became clear that the fire was far more significant than initially portrayed by the Margao Council and municipal officials when the Margao fire brigade finally contained the blaze and smoke at the site around 1:41 pm on Thursday, after nine and a half hours of firefighting.
Information revealed that the Margao fire brigade received a fire call at around 4.16 am on Thursday that the waste dump was on fire. Fire officials pointed out that the fire must have occurred much before they received the call after the municipal staff deployed at the site could not bring it under control.
Margao Fire Officer Gill D’Souza informed that operation was made difficult since the dump consisted of dry leaves, logs of wood and other green waste. “Our job was made difficult since the fire had gone deep inside the gorge. We had to use a JCB to create a slope in order to cap the fire”, he said.
That the fire fighting was not a small operation further became evident when the fire brigade used around 38,000 litres of water to cap the fire after a nine and half-hour long operation.
Though the Sonsodo waste management site is now covered with fire hydrants system as per the High Court order, the water pressure was not sufficient enough to help the fire personnel in the fire fighting operations.
