Paper Recycling Center Catches Fire

UPDATE 5 p.m. April 13 -- Montgomery County's residential paper recycling program should feel little or no impact from a two-alarm blaze Thursday night at the Gaithersburg warehouse that processes the 1,000 weekly tons of refuse.

The morning after firefighters spent hours subduing the stubborn fire, a representative of the company that owns the warehouse was “relatively confident that they could accept our paper today and at least process it to some degree,” said Tom Kusterer, recycling center manager for the county's Department of Environmental Protection.

Office Paper Systems, Inc. of Gaithersburg has the sole contract to recycle all the mixed paper gathered by the county's curbside pickup program. The 800,000-square-foot operation next to the Montgomery County Airpark recycled more than 56,000 tons of mixed paper in Fiscal 2011, Kusterer said.

ORIGINAL STORY noon April 13 -- A Gaithersburg warehouse filled with tons of shredded paper caught ablaze Thursday night in a two-alarm fire that took dozens of firefighters several hours to fully douse.

The fire broke out at around 8 p.m. at 7750 Airpark Road, in the industrial area on the north side of the Montgomery County Airpark.

No injuries were reported, and officials had not determined the cause as of this morning.

The warehouse belongs to Office Paper Systems Inc., a paper shredding company that runs Montgomery County’s mixed-paper recycling program—which includes newspaper, cardboard, telephone books, magazines and direct mail.

A county spokeswoman did not immediately know what impact the blaze will have on the county’s recycling program.

Though firefighters got a handle on the blaze within an hour, front-end loaders were needed to pull the massive paper bundles—which weigh upwards of a ton each—out of the warehouse and cover them in a foam solution, said Assistant Chief Scott Graham. Ventilation was also an issue, so firefighters called in a high-powered airboat fan to help clear the smoke out, Graham said.