On Tuesday, Sos Deiak announced that there had been a fire at the incinerator at Donostia/San Sebastian. The infrastructure did not suffer material damage and those responsible for it have pointed out that there has been no incident that could be highlighted among the workers.

The agency chaired by José Ignacio Asensio has pointed out that the smoke detectors were the ones who hit the alarm control room and that immediately the facility staff activated the emergency protocol on Tuesday. In order to cope with the fire "the workers of the incinerator have put in place the protocols previously established and have started to extinguish the fire, and have called on the firefighters to monitor it". In El Diario Vasco it can be read that the fire has been "controlled and extinguished rapidly, without any damage whatsoever".

The note sent by the Waste Consortium of Gipuzkoa, the head of the incinerator, to various media (they have not yet uploaded to its website on Wednesday morning) does not exactly match the testimony received by ARGIA through a person in it.

According to ARGIA, last Monday, the operators of the Donostia-San Sebastian incinerator began to observe smoke in a waste container of six thousand tonnes. Among the thousands of tonnes of waste that accumulate in these deposits there can be gaps in which the accumulation of methanes and gases such as these can easily ignite the bonfires, as was also seen in the Zaldibar dump. The operators tried to control the fire with hoses, shovels and hooks, but on Tuesday at noon the flames rose, it was found that a lot of smoke was occurring and called Sos Deiak.

Some workers have said that, although they have many years of experience in this kind of infrastructure, they have not seen it in their lives and they called the firefighters because they were frightened. “If it burns completely, if the entire tank burns freely, it will be a tremendous problem, both because of the extinction and because of the dioxins and gases that it would throw into the atmosphere,” ARGIA has been told a direct witness.

The GHK did not want to comment that the amount of smoke accumulated inside the building was released by the opening of the windows and their repercussions on the atmosphere and the air breathed by the neighbors.

There have been few accidents in incinerators in recent years, most of them fires in these infrastructures. This has been documented in Osaka, Viginia (USA) and Maryland, Dublin, in the city of Stabroek, near Antwerp, in Paris, in Macchiared (Sardinia), to name but a few Tuas in Singapore.