Posted on 07/26/2016 8:01:34 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
World's largest sawdust dump is on fire 'and will burn for years'
By The Siberian Times reporter 25 July 2016
Greenpeace concern as firefighters say they cannot extinguish 3 year blaze with smoke visible from space.
The mountain of sawdust is the size of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools at a site in the Ust-Kutsky district of Irkutsk region. A council spokesman said: 'It is now impossible to extinguish dump with such an amount of sawdust.
'Obviously, it will keep burning for a few more years.'
It has remained aflame winter and summer for around three years - and is seen on the video below.
Greenpeace say the sawdust dump is the largest of its kind in the world, and the campaign group has raised concerns over the smoke pollution from the site.
Already there is more than two million cubic metres of waste dumped here, reported to be waste from the Trans-Siberian Forest Company. Every day 15 new trucks arrive, each carrying around 70 cubic metres of sawdust.
The site of the endless fire is 10.4 hectares in size or 1.1 million square feet.
The company has taken measures to prevent the spread of the smoldering flames, with a mineral border line around the dump and firefighting equipment on permanent standby.
Alexander Yaroshenko, head of the Forestry Programme of Greenpeace Russia, said:'Over the past three years this fire has caused dangerous smoke to Ust-Kut and nearby settlements multiple times, with overall population of about 50,000 people.
'That is an emergency situation of at least regional scale.'
Measurements taken by state watchdog Rospotrebnadzor show that the dump fire did not cause changes to concentration of carbon dioxide in the air near the dump on days when Ust-Kut was covered with smoke, say reports.
The area has been hit recently by wildfire smoke, too.
It’s in the middle of nowhere, and transport is expensive compared to it’s value, which is essentially nil.
Why would you process it into fake logs when there’s a nearly limitless supply of real logs all around you for hundreds of miles?
with smoke visible from space......... Heck license plate numbers are visible from Space too.
Have you ever tried to burn sawdust? It doesn’t usually burn well at all.
Please stop with the logic!
That’s a dung heap, not a sawdust dump.
One would think so. The nearest town has river transportation roughly in the center of Irkutsk Oblast, the Russian equivalent of a state. This Oblast is roughly 12.24 times the size of West Virginia and roughly the same shape. Not exactly a convenient location but, compared to much of Siberia, not exactly isolated either.
It does not burn well, but make a pile too big and it will catch fire from composting and smolder for a very long time. This pile sounds like it is x1000 in comparison to the ones we see here in the U.S.
A fire in a pile of sawdust this size is inevitable.
I once did the same with a large quantity of straw mixed with chicken manure. I wanted to release that nitrogen rich mixture on a field sooner.
Actually, take a shovel full of sawdust and toss it into the air over an open flame. It creates a pretty fun fireball an mushroom cloud... not that I have ever done anything this irresponsible.
Does seem like a waste to not separate the burning from non-burning and use it, maybe in a power plant, convert to pellets for heating (this is Siberia), or for building materials, etc. Just watching it burn seems pretty stupid.
SOunds like they should be manufacturing wood pellets.
Wood pellets
Yep, just like flour. Nasty little fireball. That’s why they have grain elevator explosions, coal dust explosions and sawdust collector explosions.
I think it more accurately is an excrement dump!!! At least at this moment.
The dust!
The dust!
The dust is on fire!
not the problem.
If you care about climate, burning wood is carbon neutral since it comes from trees that absorbed the CO2 from the air as it grew.
The sawdust pile is still small compared to the rest of the wood that was shipped elsewhere.
It’s 25 acres
Big deal
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