The incident happened at 1.45am on Thursday (4 August) after a fire started in a skip inside the facility on Bolton Road, Manvers in Rotherham. Operations have continued at the site, despite the blaze.
Local newspaper reports had described the blaze as ‘huge’ but Shanks has sought to assert that this was not the case.
A Shanks’ spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that there was a small fire in which nobody was injured in a load of HWRC waste located in the quarantine area of our BDR facility in Manvers. As the fire was dealt with quickly there was no material damage to the building and the facility was fully operational that day.”
Fire
The fire was brought partially under control by workers at the facility and the fire service was called in line with the company’s procedures the spokeswoman told letsrecycle.com.
A South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said the fire was “accidental” and was put out within three hours.
He said: “Three fire engines attended the incident. The fire was started in a skip. We used heavy machinery to break up the waste as well three hose reels to put out the flames. We were at the scene for two or three hours and investigators have found the fire was started accidentally.”
The Manvers facility was developed last year in partnership with Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), it treats residual waste collected from 340,000 households across Barnsley Doncaster and Rotherham for 25 years.
Built
The plant was built as part of a £750 million PFI contract signed between the joint venture and the three South Yorkshire councils in 2012 (see letsrecycle.com story). The Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham (BDR) partnership secured £77.4m of funding from central government towards the cost of the new waste facilities.
Shanks operates mechanical biological treatment and anaerobic digestion facilities at the Bolton Road site – converting residual waste element into refuse-derived fuel (RDF). Shanks accepted its first waste load at the facility in February 2015.
The majority of the RDF produced at the plant is used to generate electricity at Multifuel Energy Limited’s £300 million multi-fuel plant in Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire – a joint venture between SSE and Wheelabrator Technologies (See letsrecycle.com story).
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