A large-scale fire at a Northside recycling center filled the night and morning air and sky with smoke across Jacksonville Tuesday as fire crews attacked the situation.
It started about midnight at the Atlantic Can Inc. facility on Palm Lake Drive off Interstate 295 and Eastport Road. The magnitude of the scene and the recycling materials on fire created more complications for crews .
“It’s dirt back there, [little] access, blockage, road blockage, so we can’t easily surround this,” Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department Capt. Eric Prosswimmer said. “… We’ve got about 3 to 4 acres of debris and such burning.”
“Rubber burns very hot,” he said. “So what we’re dealing with is you hit it with water, we can dampen it down, but if you stop that flow of water, then it’s gonna flare right back up. If you look back now, it’s far smaller than it was when we first arrived in the middle of the night once we got water in place. We may not have fully extinguished it, but we’ve really dampened it down quite a bit.”