Fire Burns For Hours At Brooklyn Recycling Plant
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Firefighters are still on the scene of a stubborn fire in Brooklyn that burned all night at a recycling plant.
Crews were still putting out hot spots Wednesday morning at a 2-story recycling plant on Humboldt Street in Greenpoint.
About 160 firefighters responded to the 4-alarm fire, which broke out around 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Firefighters said what made battling the blaze more difficult was the amount of flammable materials inside the buildings
"It's a recycling plant, we had hundreds of bales of cardboard wrapped tight with steel bands and we also had numerous bales of rags," FDNY Deputy Chief Brendan McSweeney told CBS 2's Weijia Jiang. "Gaining final extinguishment is very difficult because everything is so compressed, it's very hard to get to the deep-seeded, charred, smoldering debris."
Officials said the part of a wall and the roof collapsed and at times, smoke could be seen across the river in Manhattan.
"This is a series of six interconnected buildings, it's a recycling complex. It's very heavily packed with all types of materials - papers, plastics," deputy fire chief Robert Strong told WCBS 880's Peter Haskell. "We're just gonna have to keep pouring water on this thing until we can get it finally extinguished. That's gonna, unfortunately, take us a while to do that."
A handful of firefighters suffered minor injuries, Haskell reported.
No word yet on what sparked the fire.
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