Fire crews still fighting 400,000-tonne bark blaze

Firefighters have been at the Weston Longville site since Wednesday evening

A major woodchip blaze that could be smelt across a city has required crews from almost all of a county's fire stations to keep it under control.

Norfolk Fire Service was called to the TMA Bark site in Weston Longville, to the west of Norwich, on Wednesday evening and remained at the scene.

The service is now estimating that about 400,000 tonnes of bark has been affected, requiring crews from 39 of its 42 stations to attend.

Steve Mason, group manager for operations at the service, said: "If the smoke is still affecting people, we advise they keep their doors and windows where they can but hopefully in the next day or so that will slowly diminish."

Smoke has drifted from the bark blaze for miles around

Smoke could be smelt across the wider Norwich area on Thursday morning, with reports that it had reached as far east as Acle.

The service was called to the commercial site at about 20:15 BST on Wednesday and has had "extensive resources" there ever since.

It hoped the main part of the fire would be extinguished by the end of Saturday but with a controlled burn being used to manage the smaller areas still alight.

Mr Mason continued: "It's been a case of controlling the burn, moving piles so they don't become involved and slowly reducing the size of the burning piles so they can extinguish those and then be moved away.

"So it will slowly reduce the smoke in the area, there is still a reasonable amount of smoke drifting away from the incident.

"Fortunately the weather has been favourable in as much as the winds aren't strong, so that's helping not to blow the embers and cause further spread of the fire.

"But local residents will still see that low smoke haze coming across the countryside."

Norfolk Fire and Rescue hoped to have the TMA Bark fire under control on Saturday evening

The extra resource has included additional water carriers, drones and an aerial ladder platform, with Mr Mason saying staff had been "working tirelessly".

"We've had just about every appliance in the county attend this incident on more than one occasion, some crews three or four times on a rotational basis," he said.

"That's put some additional pressure on fire cover around the county and on a lot of staff because most of our stations are on-call firefighters, so they all have other jobs in the community."

The cause of the fire is yet to be determined. TMA Bark has been approached for comment.