Dump firesLast week’s Pembroke Dump fire is another stunning example of the force of nature and the risks that fire always poses to life and property.

But while fires are always a risk, the scale of the blaze was entirely due to human error at best and to negligence at worst.

Any form of composting - which is essentially what Pembroke Dump is on an industrial scale - creates intense heat at its core and when combined with the methane gases trapped in parts of the old dump, this always presents the possibility of spontaneous combustion.

When it is allowed to grow into a virtual mountain, as it was last week, then the risk is that much greater.

By all accounts, the waste was allowed to build up because first one piece of equipment broke down and then the back-up machine followed suit. New parts were ordered months ago but still have not arrived.

In this case it would have made sense to have either spread the waste out in smaller piles or to have stopped dumping altogether. Business as usual proved to be an entirely predictable disaster.

It can be argued that hindsight is 20-20, and Works Minister Dennis Lister said last week that lessons had been learned. But the fact is that a similar lesson was learned less than two years ago at the Tynes Bay Incinerator when lumber was allowed to build up when one of the incinerator streams at the plant was out of service. The result was a spectacular and dangerous blaze.

Now, essentially the same thing has happened, and the Works Ministry needs to be held accountable for failing to heed past lessons.

There is some irony in the fact that Government only two weeks ago was talking about charging people for the compost being generated at the dump, and now it has been burned to a cinder. But that notion has raised questions about the future of the dump.

When composting began at the Dump, the idea was to create sufficient soil cover to reshape the land in order to turn it into a park. Now it would seem the volume of composting means that the park plan has been put on permanent hold and Government plans to keep composting there forever, and making a buck out of it.

The losers in all of this are the residents of Parsons Road, Friswells Hill, Marsh Folly and the surrounding areas, who have been promised a park for around two decades and are now subject to devastating fires with no certainty that they will not be repeated. That’s not good enough.