Summer fire chokes Kodungaiyur

Residents said the fire had broken out near the main gate of the dump yard. “There was a lot of dust and smoke, inconveniencing the residents and other who use this road. This is common during summer; the people living around the dump yard have to bear the brunt,” said Ganesh, a local resident, a 58-year-old who has been living in Kodungaiyur since 1978 – even before the yard was set up. 

“Earlier, it was just a grassy patch and people had started building their houses here. But since the dump yard came up in 1998, the residents have been suffering. The Madras High Court had ordered to stop the burning of garbage in 2002 after a PIL we filed. We have been attending one court hearing after another, but there has been no solution to our problem,” Ganesh added.

Terming the fire as ‘minor’, an official from the Tamil Nadu Fire and Rescue Services (TNFRS), said, “It was brought under control within minutes, as fire tenders from Sembium visited the spot after the alert. Burning the garbage is routine at the dump yard. But after residential area developed around it, people have started complaining.”

A Corporation official said they had deployed an additional team since March 1 to keep the dump yard under scrutiny, as fires in the dump yard during summer are common. “The fire was due to the formation of methane gas. Two water tankers of 12,000-litre capacity and 12 tanks of 2,000 litre capacity were used to douse the fire immediately.”

However, residents are angry that the civic body has failed to act despite decades of protests. In 2012, a team from Community Environmental Monitoring took an air sample during a similar fire incident in Kodungaiyur, and found 19 toxic chemicals in the air, including carcinogens like 1, 3-butadiene, which was 8.5 times higher than levels considered safe, and Benzene (which causes childhood blood cancer) at levels 50 times higher than considered safe. 

Shweta Narayanan, a member of that team, said, “When it burns, the mixed garbage emits toxins, which can cause cancer. The samples of dust, too, showed the presence of heavy metals. The fires in the Kodungaiyur dump yard are common. The Corporation has failed to act on the problem of the dump yard. They have failed to implement the Solid Waste Management rules, and have been wilfully poisoning the people of Kodungaiyur by not moving towards removing the dump yard through sustainable waste management instead of just shifting it to another place outside the city.”