A FIREFIGHTER has told how crews tackled a massive junkyard fire.

The incident, made more dangerous by the presence of acetylene cylinders, broke out at Cliff's Auto Salvage, on Old Station Road, South Bank, Middlesbrough, at around 7.40pm last night.

At one stage 13 fire crews, including a hydraulic platform and a command and control unit were on scene, with resources pulled in from all over the county.

Speaking to the Northern Echo from the scene shortly after 12.30am today, Billingham Station Manager Steve McCarten, who was Operations Commander at the incident, said: "When the first pump from Grangetown arrived they were met with a large fire and heavy plumes of smoke. There were a large number of cars, up to 30, on fire along with a building.

"The surrounding buildings were at risk at that time and one of them was suffering some heat damage and the crews priority at the time was to stop the fire spreading to those buildings.

"They immediately put some measures in place to prevent that. Because we believed there may have been cylinders involved, we then put monitors in place and all of our personnel backed off to a safe distance."

The fire, contained to a 20m by 20m area, was brought under control and shortly after midnight the incident was scaled down, with three appliances remaining at the scene.

"We have no idea how it started at the moment," Mr McCarten said. "We haven't even been able to start a preliminary investigation because we identified what looked like an acetylene cylinder, so we had to withdraw from the incident and move into protection mode."

Mr McCarten said the cooling down process would take 24-hours and crews would stay on site until 8pm tonight. A 200m exclusion zone was established as a precaution.

"We have had to evacuate a couple of adjacent premises," Mr McCarten said. "Nobody was injured."

The owners of the scrapyard played their part in assisting the emergency services.

"They gave us an indication of some of the things that were in there, and told us there were some cylinders inside," he said. "But we also used the police helicopter to identify any other hazards. We wanted to confirm that what we thought was on fire was on fire."

Mr McCarten said firefighters were well-drilled to deal with incidents of this nature.

"It doesn't happen too regularly, but it is something we plan for because acetylene is widely used," he said. "We have to treat it very, very carefully because it is very volatile."

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