Work begins to remove parts of damaged building at site of huge Telford blaze
Work has started to remove parts of the damaged building at the site of a huge blaze in Telford.
Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service has been working hard for nearly two weeks dealing with the fire that broke out at Greenway Polymers near the M54 in Telford.
Teams from across the county worked to put out the blaze, and work has now begun removing damaged parts of the building to give contractors easier access to demolish it.
The fire broke out just after midday on Monday, April 26 when waste material at the recycling plant went up in flames.
The smoke could be seen across Telford and is still visible now.
Guy Williams, a fire officer who is part of the command team at Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service, said they are working together with their partners to remove part of the building today.
He said: "The incident is progressing – we hope to start removing the side of the building on Saturday afternoon, and there maybe additional smoke in the area.
"This will be mixed with water from the sprays that are used to protect the contractors on site, so it might not all be smoke you see, you might see mist. There will potentially be an increase in smoke in the area Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, into Sunday and the start of next week.
"Other key milestones at this site will be processing some of the weight and moving it around the site.
"We are incredibly restricted by the footprint of the site and we need to keep the water that's being applied, and obviously the rainwater, on site so it doesn't contaminate other areas."
Working with the fire service on the site is Severn Trent, The Environment Agency, Public Health England and Telford & Wrekin Council.
The Environment Agency has been on site to make sure no contaminated water leaves the site.
Guy added: "I would ask for your patience. Thank you for your support, please stay away from the area and understand what a difficult protracted incident this is that we are dealing with."
The huge ongoing operation to extinguish the fire began nearly two weeks ago and the clean-up operation is predicted to take months.
When the fire broke out schools and roads closed and traffic on the nearby M54 was affected.
