Spontaneous Combustion Ignites Wood Mulch Piles At Town Landfill

By Andrew Gorosko

It smelled like a thousand lit cigars.

But it was not a tobacconists’ convention.

It was a pesky and persistent smoldering fire that had ignited by spontaneous combustion in the wood mulch piles that the town keeps at its Ethan Allen Road landfill.

Botsford firefighters were alerted about 7:08 am Wednesday that a fire had ignited in the towering mulch piles which are created when piles of trees, stumps, and brush are chipped and then left in heaps. The landfill opened that morning at 7 and town workers alerted firefighters of the problem.

Such fires occur when internal heat is generated in the mulch piles by the decomposition of wood chips.

At 11:10 pm on Tuesday, Botsford firefighters had received a report of a glow in the woods and smoke in the area, but the source of the problem went undetected until the next morning.

To extinguish the persistent, smoldering fire, town workers used heavy equipment to spread out the wood chips, which firefighters then doused with water that was laced with firefighting chemicals.

It took almost five hours to extinguish the smoking wood chips.

Town Public Works Director Fred Hurley estimated that there were about 1,000 cubic yards of wood chips on the site when the fire occurred.

Mr Hurley said the situation amounts to a “nuisance” that sometimes happens when wood chips are stockpiled.

Fortunately, much of the wood mulch that had been kept at the landfill had been recently carted away, Mr Hurley said. Had the mulch piles been bigger, it would have been very difficult to extinguish the fire, he said.

Marty Schertzer of the Botsford fire company was the incident commander at the fire. Newtown Hook & Ladder and Sandy Hook firefighters assisted.