Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said the city is looking into all the “legal options” to prevent another fire from happening at the EMR Southern Recycling yard on Bayou Chico.
The fire that occurred at the scrap yard in the early morning hours of May 26 ultimately had 32 firefighters respond and involved the Pensacola Fire Department, Escambia County Emergency Management, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection over the course of 12 hours.
Escambia County also put out a warning for a smoke plume that stretched to the northwest as far away as Pine Forest High School, more than 6 miles away.
The fire was the fourth at the facility in two years.
“Frankly, we’ve had enough issues at this particular facility,” Reeves said. “Four times in two years is not normal. That is certainly an outlier. What we’re proceeding with, we have had meetings in the last 24 hours with our city attorney’s office, with our code enforcement, we’re going to understand every tool available to us to ensure that everybody who does business or lives in the city is a good neighbor.”
Reeves said the city attorney is drafting letters to both the company’s U.S. headquarters in New Jersey and its parent company in the United Kingdom, demanding better fire prevention at the facility and looking into what legal actions it can take. EMR Pensacola’s parent company is European Metal Recycling Limited, based in Warrington, England.
“We’re going to certainly share our grave concerns about this, and that four times in two years isn’t acceptable,” Reeves said. “So we’re going to do that right out of the gate, and concurrently, we’re going to find out what controls we have in place. What oversight do we have in place? This is a private company doing business on private property. Obviously, it is zoned to allow this type of operation to exist. That being said, we’re going to see what our options are, because I cannot sit idly by while we put another 32 firefighters for 12 straight hours out here. And let’s not even stop at the primary safety risk; the taxpayers are paying for this. The taxpayers are paying for 32 people to go out there and to have their response times at risk as well.”
Pensacola Fire Chief Ginny Cranor said that the fire was caught early because the city had asked EMR to install thermal imaging equipment on site after the fire in 2024, which automatically notified the fire department once it detected a high temperature on the site.
“Early notification for any fire is a priority for us,” Cranor said. “So, it’s just a deep-seated fire, who knows how long it had smoldered before it activated that thermal imaging system.”
Cranor said the fire on a pile of scrap metal was larger than previous piles that have caught fire at the facility.
Cranor said it’s unlikely they’ll ever know for certain what caused the blaze, but they are looking at the operational factors of the recycling facility that may have led to the fire.
“This would be something that would have to be caused from lightning or a lithium-ion battery or something like that,” Cranor said. “But the facility is required to remove fuel tanks, fuel lines, that’s all part of their regulatory requirements. So we did not have involvement of any flammable liquids or anything like that, but there could have been some combustible metals that reach a certain temperature and heat up and sustain combustion.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola has ‘had enough’ after 4th scrapyard fire; investigating legal options
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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