A thick cloud of black smoke has covered the town of Viviez, in Aveyron, since the fire broke out on Saturday afternoon in the warehouse of one of the European leaders in recycling hybrid and electric batteries.
The flames broke out in an annex to the industrial site containing 900 tonnes of lithium batteries for a reason which remains, for the moment, unknown.
“If the fire is contained, controlled and has lost intensity, it is slow burning and is likely to last several hours
,” the Aveyron prefecture said in a press release published overnight from Saturday to Sunday.
Around sixty firefighters from the department were mobilized to contain the flames, with the support of a team specializing in technological risk from the Bouches-du-Rhône firefighters.
This Sunday morning, around thirty firefighters are still on site for surveillance operations.
If the fire no longer appears to present any danger to the surrounding population,
“preventive confinement over a radius of 500 meters was decided”
on Saturday afternoon, the time to control the toxicity of the smoke,
Le Figaro
learned from Protection civil.
It was lifted on Saturday evening.
Météo France was also asked to model the spread of smoke to determine the impact of possible atmospheric pollution.
The Aveyron prefecture, however, reassures by specifying that
“the measurements carried out, on site and around the site, with regard to the substances emitted in the smoke have made it possible to rule out any risk for the populations”
.