Recyclable materials | Lachine sorting center paralyzed by fire

Montreal’s new recycling sorting center has been shut down for a week due to a fire caused by an object that should not have ended up in a recycling bin and which caused significant damage. learned Press.

Jean-Thomas Léveillé
Press

The blaze mobilized some 70 firefighters for a good part of the day, last Thursday, in this building in the Lachine borough inaugurated in 2019, built at a cost of 45 million dollars.

“When the firefighters arrived, the building was completely covered in smoke, black, greasy smoke. The visibility was zero, ”told Press the head of the media relations section of the Montreal Fire Department (SSIM), Alain Laplante, Wednesday.

The presence of pits in the floor of this immense building of 7,500 square meters represented a risk for the sappers who moved blindly, thus slowing down their work.

The help of the workers was beneficial in this regard, underlined Alain Laplante.

Firefighters then had to dismantle several pieces of equipment, including a “tunnel conveyor”, so that the water reached the flames, he added.

About ten hours elapsed between the call to 911 at 11:39 a.m. and the end of the intervention at 9:18 p.m.

“It is an intervention which was extremely long”, affirms the spokesperson of the SSIM, specifying that it was “very difficult to get the smoke out of the building” after having extinguished the flames.

Caused by a battery

The Lachine borough sorting center is owned by the City of Montreal, but is operated by the private company Rebuts Solid Canadian, whose bankruptcy caused much ink to flow in February 2020 – the company was then bought out. by Ricova in the liquidation process.

Read the article from February 3, 2020

Viewing the “process monitoring videos” showed that the fire was started by a battery that caught fire on a conveyor belt, explained to Press engineer Arnaud Budka, director of residual materials management at the City of Montreal.

An employee had time to remove the battery, but a small item that caught fire continued on its way, he explains.

Batteries are a real scourge in sorting centers, where they regularly cause fires.

“This type of incident clearly shows the importance of paying attention to what you put in your recycling bin,” says Arnaud Budka.

Heavy damage

The fire caused moderate damage to the building, but it seriously damaged the equipment, which explains why activities have come to a complete standstill since the incident.

“These are cabling, valves, hydraulic elements” which must be repaired by specialized companies, explains Arnaud Budka, who anticipates that activities will resume on Friday or Monday.

Whatever the amount of damage, it will not cost the City anything, assures Arnaud Budka, explaining that the operating contract for the sorting center specifies that the responsibility for any incident lies with its operator, Ricova, or its insurers.

“The stop [des activités] does not cost anything either, since they are expected to have an alternative solution, ”he adds.

In this case, the 80 or so trucks that daily dump the contents of the recycling bins of 58% of households in the Montreal agglomeration must temporarily take the road to the sorting center of the Saint-Michel Environmental Complex, in the borough. de Villeray – Saint-Michel – Parc-Extension, also operated by Ricova.

“The fundraising activities are going as planned,” says Budka.

The Ricova company did not recall Press.