Corpn building 5L-litre sump at Vellalore yard to fight fire

Coimbatore: Just days after extinguishing a fire that spread on the Vellalore dump yard, the city corporation is constructing a five lakh-litre sump at the yard to store water.
Corporation commissioner Sravan Kumar Jatavath inspected the construction work on Wednesday.

“Even though a couple of borewells and wells are situated at the dump yard, we wanted to store water to meet the requirement during an emergency. So, we decided to construct a sump inside the yard itself,” said a senior official in-charge of the yard. The work is expected to be completed within 40 days.

Treated water from the Ukkadam sewage treatment plant (STP) will be used to fill the sump through pipelines, the official said. “We will soon lay pipelines for 1.5km to connect the STP and the yard.”

Fulfilling an old promise, the corporation will also install several CCTV cameras across the 650-acre yard. The cameras will be useful to monitor the yard round-the-clock, the official said. “We plan to fix over 50 CCTV cameras.”

Recalling the instances when garbage trucks dumped garbage outside the yard during night hours, the official said that they have requested the commissioner to depute sanitary inspectors at the yard. “Sanitary inspectors will make sure that solid wastes are segregated and only wet wastes are dumped in the yard.”

The corporation has stationed two water tenders belonging to the Coimbatore south fire station at the yard till the end of the summer. They will be useful to check the spread of fire, the official said.

“We have completed the process of gathering the accumulated solid wastes into heaps in order to make way for the water tenders. During the recent fire, water tenders could not even reach the source of fire as there was no space to move,” he added.