4-alarm fire hits recycling plant in Southwest Fresno

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Fresno firefighters expect to spend the next two days dousing the hot spots from a four-alarm fire that started early Tuesday morning at a recycling plant off Highway 99.

Bairos Recycling is south of Golden State on Orange Avenue in Southwest Fresno. All day, firefighters have been attacking the flames from the air. Three hoses have been saturating the cardboard and recycling products. The blaze began around 1 a.m. and is expected to take days to completely extinguish.

The orange flames lit up the sky, and from the moment firefighters pulled up, they had an incredibly difficult task.

"Imagine two football fields, picture hay bales but instead of hay it's cardboard, it's various combustible materials packed together real densely, stacked about 20 feet high or so," said Fresno Fire Department spokesman Koby Johns.

Investigators aren't sure how the fire started, but with so much fuel and windy conditions, the flames grew out of control very quickly. At one point, 65 firefighters were trying to take down the flames.

All day Tuesday the work continued, using heavy equipment and pulling the recyclables apart and hosing them off -- that process is long and tedious.

"It's very time intensive," said Johns. "You got to work together with heavy machinery operators, because they go in and break apart the pile and then they will rip apart the bales while we put the fire out in the bales, and then they will start creating more piles, and those piles become unstable because of all the wet material. So it's a very dangerous operation."

The fire was declared a four alarm just 25 minutes after it began, meaning 20 engines and trucks were called to the scene. Every single firefighter on duty in the city of Fresno Monday night was working all night. This was the first of two large fires that broke out overnight.

The recycling plant fire smoldered all day, leaving clouds of smoke billowing into the sky and making air quality even worse.

Fire investigators won't say if this fire is suspicious. They are looking to try to pinpoint where it started and how it may have begun.