(Reuters) – Thick, toxic smoke hovered over Richmond, Indiana, on Thursday as a relentless industrial fire roared at a plastics recycling warehouse in the Midwestern U.S. town where hundreds of people have been forced to evacuate.
The fire in the city of 35,000 people began Tuesday afternoon in a semi-trailer packed with plastics parked behind a warehouse. The blaze spread from the trailer to nearby piles of plastic and then to two warehouses, fire officials said, sending a black plume of smoke high into the air.
The blaze forced some 2,000 people living in a 1/2-mile (0.8 km) radius to evacuate, local media reported.
The evacuation order remained in effect on Thursday after a night of very little wind caused smoke from the fire to settle in and around the city and areas that had not previously had issues, the Wayne County Emergency Management Agency said on Facebook.
“If you find yourself in an area of smoke, please shelter-in-place and limit outside activity during this time. As the morning progresses, conditions should improve in and around the city,” it said.
The blaze could continue to burn for days, local officials have said. State and local officials were expected to give the community an update on the fire and the conditions during a 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) news conference.
The fire has been contained to the My Way Trading complex where large amounts of chipped, shredded and bulk recycled plastic was stored, local fire officials said on Wednesday. The business owner had been previously cited for operating an unsafe building and given an order to clean it up, the city’s mayor said.
Indiana’s Fire Marshal Stephen Jones warned on Tuesday that the smoke was toxic. On Wednesday, a Wayne County Health Department official said the particles floating in the air from the fire could cause respiratory problems and aggravate asthma.
“I’m isolated here. Feeling like I’m the lone survivor of an apocalypse,” Richmond resident Derek Crane said on Facebook. “I’m exaggerating, of course, but don’t discount the seriousness of the smoke.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was collecting debris samples from the fire to determine whether asbestos, which causes cancer, had left the site. It was also monitoring for hazardous material in the air, it said.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
