Ohio Valley Recycling blaze under investigation

The Ironton Fire Department is investigating a blaze at Ohio Valley Recycling after the facility at 475 Commerce Drive caught on fire Friday afternoon.

The IFD was called out at 5:30 p.m.

The cause of the fire is unknown.

“We aren’t really sure what it was,” IFD Captain Joe Stevens said. “The building is full of aluminum and other metals and it seemed to be burning around the walls. We’re not sure how it started, we are not sure what it was.”

Firefighters were on scene for about two and half hours.

“A lot of it was just trying to move things around and get to the fire,” Stevens said. “They had trails in there, we had to move stuff to make more trails.”

Stevens said their biggest concerns was that they  didn’t really know what was in there.

He said it wasn’t a large fire, but some of the aluminum scrap in the building melted.

“It was hot when they got in there,” he said, adding it took about 15-20 minutes to get the fire under control and then the rest of the time was making sure there weren’t any hot spots.

Ohio Valley Recycling opened in September 2016.

The recycling center buys scrap metal, from steel, copper, aluminum, tin, appliances and cars and then sells it to another company.