OPINION: ‘When is a waste site ready to restart after a fire?’

OPINION: Following last week’s fire, London Fire Brigade left the facility on 31 August and responsibility was handed back to LondonEnergy. The company said all employees were safe and there had been no injuries. It has since begun a review of the incident and an assessment of the facility, while waste that would normally pass through Wembley continues to be redirected through other parts of its network.

For waste operators, that period between hand-back and restart deserves as much attention as the emergency response itself.

A site may be back under the operator’s control, but there can still be damaged structures, affected plant, contaminated areas, disrupted traffic routes or temporary changes to waste storage and handling. Restarting too quickly can introduce risks that were not present before the incident.

Environment Agency fire-prevention guidance reflects this. Fire prevention plans for permitted sites accepting combustible waste must include contingency arrangements for dealing with the period during and after a fire. That includes alternative destinations for incoming waste, clearing and decontaminating the site, and the steps that must be taken before the facility becomes operational again.

Contingency operation is therefore not simply an inconvenience to be ended as soon as possible. It gives the operator time to establish what has changed.

Before normal activity resumes, six questions are worth answering:

1. Has the affected area been properly assessed?

The extent of damage may not be obvious from a visual walk-round alone. Buildings, conveyors, electrical systems, fire detection equipment, drainage and mobile plant may all need inspection before they are brought back into use.

Any restrictions placed on parts of the site should also be clear to employees and contractors.

2. Have the causes and contributing factors been examined?

At the time of writing, the cause of the Wembley fire has not been publicly confirmed. Operators should avoid making assumptions after any incident.

The investigation should establish what is known, what remains uncertain and whether existing controls need to change before activity restarts.

3. Does the fire prevention plan still reflect the site?

The Environment Agency says fire prevention plans should be reviewed following a fire or near miss.

If an incident has exposed a weakness in storage arrangements, detection, quarantine areas, separation distances, emergency access or another control, the plan may need revising rather than simply putting the previous version back into use.

4. Can waste safely begin moving through the site again?

Restart decisions need to consider more than whether machinery works.

Operators should look at available storage capacity, pile sizes, traffic routes, fire-water arrangements, quarantine areas and the condition of areas where waste will be deposited or processed.

This becomes particularly important if contingency arrangements have changed volumes elsewhere in the network or created a backlog that could return to the site quickly once it reopens.

5. Do the people returning to the site understand what has changed?

A recovered site may operate differently from the one employees left.

Temporary exclusions, altered vehicle routes, unavailable equipment or revised emergency arrangements need to be communicated before shifts resume. Contractors and visiting drivers should be included where those changes affect them.

6. Who has authorised the move back to normal operation?

A clear recovery gate can prevent restart becoming a series of informal decisions made under pressure.

The operator should be able to show what inspections have been completed, what actions remain open, which temporary controls are in place and who has accepted the residual risk.

For the wider waste sector, the Wembley incident is a reminder that resilience is not only about maintaining collections while a facility is unavailable.

LondonEnergy’s decision to redirect waste through the rest of its network shows the value of having alternative arrangements available when a major site is inaccessible. The next test is the transition back.

Fire-service handback, contingency operation and full restart are three different stages. Treating them as such gives operators the opportunity to check that the site they are reopening is safe for the conditions that now exist, rather than simply returning to the arrangements that were in place before the fire.