AMC to install fire fighting systems at all garbage plants

Aurangabad, April 16:

The Aurangabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has set up garbage processing plants by spending crores of rupees at Padegaon and Chikalthana. The AMC has installed fire extinguishers at these sites. However, the civic administration sans any fire protection and safety system to tackle if there emerge any mega fire accident at any of these plants.

As reported earlier, the garbage processing plant at Chikalthana caught fire on Friday early morning and even after 48 hours the fire is yet to be doused completely. The fire fighters continues to use water tenders to douse the fire on Saturday. Taking a lesson from the incident, the AMC administration has decided to tke fire safety measures on a permanent basis and go for installation of state-of-the-art fire fighting system at these garbage plants, soon.

The above two plants process a quantity of 150 metric tones of dry garbage daily, while a quantity of 40 MT wet garbage is processed at Kanchanwadi plant.

The deputy municipal commissioner Saurabh Joshi said that the fire could be totally under controlled and no smoke will be emanating from it from Sunday morning.

When asked about the absence of the fire system, Joshi said, “ We have tanks to store lakhs of litres of water on the campus of the plants.Now, we will install modern fire fighting systems at Padegaon and Chikalthana processing plants.The proposal in this regard will be made soon.”

“ The bailing machine and shed of the project got burnt in the accident.The functioning of plant was commissioned two years ago.After total controlling of the fire on Sunday, the engineering section officials will visit the site.The inspection will reveal the actual amount of losses. The prima facie it seems the loss could be between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 60 lakh, stressed Joshi.

According to fire brigade section, “ The tank storing a capacity of 10 lakh to 15 lakh litres of water on the campus helped fighters to control the wildfire.The whole campus would have gutted into ashes if there would have been no water tank at the site.”