ENFIELD, Maine — Workers at a Route 2 electrical plant were keeping a watchful eye on a large bark mulch pile Thursday after firefighters battled a blaze there for 12½ hours earlier in the week.
No injuries were reported, officials said.
The fire on Tuesday was the third at the mulch pile at Covanta Energy Corp., 1231 Main Road, since Feb. 1, Lowell Fire Chief Rick Smart said. The most difficult aspect of fighting such a fire, Smart said, “is the time it takes to dig it out.”
“It has a lot of hot embers in there, so it takes quite a lot to cool them,” the fire chief said Thursday. “As it sits, it generates its own heat, and once air gets to it, it flares, and they end up with a fire.”
Covanta fuels its electricity-generating bark boiler with wood mulch, Smart said. The mulch can ignite from a spark or from heat created by the chemical processes that occur naturally during drying and decomposition. Dousing mulch piles lessens the risk of fire.
Firefighters from the Lowell Fire Department, which covers Enfield, got the alarm from the company about 7 a.m. When they arrived, workers had dug into the 50-foot-deep pile with bucket loaders and spread out much of the mulch for firefighters to douse, Smart said.
“They had embers down in deep that they had to dig out,” Smart said.
The Lincoln and Passadumkeag fire departments assisted Lowell’s crew throughout the day. As many as a dozen firefighters battled the blaze, Smart said.
Eight of the 24 workers employed at the site helped firefighters, said Bryan Osgood, the facility’s manager. Workers try to prevent pile fires by rotating the material regularly and hosing it down occasionally, he said.
Firefighters “did a very good job helping us out here,” Osgood said.
The Feb. 1 fire was reported shortly before 6 p.m. and lasted almost three hours. The second fire was reported at 3 a.m. Feb. 2 and took about four hours to extinguish, Smart said.
Acquired by Covanta in 2008, the West Enfield Power Station began commercial operation in November 1987. The facility takes wood waste from forest operations, thinnings and sawmills and combusts it in specially designed boilers to generate renewable energy, according to covanta.com.
The facility processes 50 dry tons of biomass waste materials per day, producing 24.5-megawatts of electricity for ISO-New England, a regional transmission organization serving Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.