JEDDAH, 22 January 2008 — A fire broke out Sunday night at the old city dump in Al-Ajwad area east of Jeddah, only a week after a similar fire in the same location which was blamed on garbage diggers.
According to municipality officials, the fire was contained by yesterday afternoon with the participation of the Civil Defense units.
The old landfill, which was officially closed last week, has been seeing increasing fire incidents during the past few months, even though the Jeddah Municipality has reported deployment of more security and monitoring personnel at the site.
Abdullah Al-Silami, an official at the monitoring department of the municipality, said that the dump is currently being filled in order to turn the area into a public park. He said that a major area of the dump has already been filled and that the fire broke out in a small part that remained.
The fire was easy to control, he said, because of the availability of bulldozers and water trucks that were already present on site, he said.
“Fires at the old dump would soon be a thing of the past,” he assured. The whole site, he said, is expected to be totally covered and leveled within a month.
He said that all garbage diggers have disappeared from the site after the leveling project began. Some have been seen trying to infiltrate the new dumpsite, which began operations last week, but they were all stopped by the security personnel guarding the site.
According to residents of Al-Ajwad district, fires at the old dump have been more common.
Ali Al-Ghanmi, resident of the area, said that the announcement of the dump’s shift might have pushed the illegal garbage diggers to burn more materials to gain as much recyclable materials as they can before the closure of the site.
“We have been suffering for years from the constant fires that produced toxic smoke,” Al-Ghanmi said, adding that even though the whole neighborhood kept complaining to the municipality, nothing was ever done.
