With a handful of fires reported at Wilkinson Brothers Recycling Company on 3145 E. 14th St. in the past few years, local residents have become suspicious of their convenience and frequency.
"It seems that every time they get a large amount of rubbish and trash that can't be recycled, there's a fire in the middle of the night and it's gone in a few hours," said a woman living on Taft Street near the recycling plant. "It's too convenient for my liking."
The latest fire occurred in the early morning hours of Nov. 3, a Saturday, where Brownsville Fire Department dispatchers report that a call came in at 1:55 a.m. of a fire of an undetermined type had erupted again at the back of the recycling yard. The firefighters remained at the blaze until the last entry was made at 6:36 a.m that morning.
In their report, firefighters indicated none of them or any civilians were hurt..The report also noted that upon arrival, they found a large pile of debris consisting of trash metal, "foam, plastic and other discarded material on fire...no known property loss occurred since pile was basically made up of rubbish."
This last entry is what has made local residents suspicious of the reoccurring blazes at the recycling plant. They note that the fires – spaced at about six months apart (April to November) – usually occur in the wee hours of the morning when there are no workers on the site. They say the fires usually involve the foam and moldings from cars and other objects from which metal is removed. The only thing that burns is the trash, with none of the recyclable metal reported damaged.
"Why does it always happen that it's only the trash that gets burned, and not the valuable copper and aluminum that is stored at the plant, too?" asked a neighbor. "It seems like everytime the trash starts to pile up and it's going to cost the plant money to get rid of it at the landfill, a fire erupts and just like that it's gone."
However, since none of these suspicions have spurted in the minds of the local fire chief Lenny Perez or his Fire Prevention investigators, the reoccurring trash fires at the plant will probably continue, despite the fact that the resultant clouds of toxic smoke and fallout rain down upon the adjacent neighborhoods. At the time of the Nov. 3 fire, residents reported chemical droplets raining down on their homes and people having to go inside to avoid getting splattered by the toxic rain.
So far, no investigation into the suspicious nature of the fires there or the potential health effects on the residents in nearby neighborhoods has been reported.
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