The dump in Bhalswa, in the north of the city, is taller than a 17-story building and covers an area larger than 50 football fields.
Acrid smoke hangs over New Delhi for the second day after a massive dump went up in flames during a scorching heat wave, forcing informal waste workers to endure dangerous conditions.
The dump in Bhalswa, in the north of the city, is taller than a 17-story building and covers an area larger than 50 football fields.
Garbage workers living in nearby houses had emptied the streets on Tuesday night.
But by Wednesday morning, the thousands of people who live and work at the dump had begun the dangerous process of trying to salvage the trash from the fire.
“There is a fire every year. It is not new. There is risk to life and livelihood, but what do we do?” asked Bhairo Raj, 31, an informal waste worker who lives next to the dump. He said that his children studied there and that he could not afford to leave.
The Indian capital, like the rest of South Asia, is in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave that experts say was a catalyst for the landfill fire. Three other dumps around the Indian capital have also caught fire in recent weeks.
The landfill was planned to be closed in the last fire more than 10 years ago, but some 2,300 tons of city garbage is still dumped there every day. Organic waste in the landfill breaks down, resulting in a buildup of highly combustible methane gas.
“With high temperatures, this spontaneous combustion will take place,” said Ravi Agarwal, director of Toxics Link, a New Delhi-based advocacy group that focuses on waste management.
Several fire trucks went to the landfill on Tuesday to try to put out the fire. At night, the landfill looked like a burning mountain and burned until dawn.
Last month was the hottest March in India in over a century and the current month has been one of the hottest Aprils in years. Temperatures crossed 43 degrees Celsius (109.4F) in several cities on Tuesday and are forecast to rise further.
“India’s current heat wave has been made hotter by climate change,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate sciences at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
She said that unless the world stops adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, such heat waves will become even more common.
