Halloween fires cause €5m damage at industrial park in Cork

An estimated €5 million of damage was caused at an enterprise park in Cork on Halloween night in a series of fires that gardaí and fire investigators are treating as suspicious.

Nobody was injured, but at least 20 people were out of work yesterday as a result of the fires which devastated the Durapak agricultural storage unit at the Ballincollig enterprise park in Innishmore, and caused serious damage to other premises.

Ten units of Cork city and county fire brigade attended the scene after the alarm was raised by a member of the public at 2.18am yesterday.

Sixty firefighters using five pumps, a water tanker and two platforms were involved in tackling the four separate blazes at the estate which was also attended by a rescue unit and a rapid response unit.

Shortly before the fires broke out, a number of youths threw two petrol bombs at a Garda patrol car that had been called to deal with a public order incident in the Innishmore area.

Firefighters who were called to deal with a number of illegal fires in the Castlepark estate in Ballincollig were forced to leave the area when youths hurled plastic bottles at them.

Gerry Myers, third officer of Cork City Fire Brigade, said that when the fire crews arrived at the enterprise park, they found a bottle bank alight at the entrance to the park and a minibus belonging to Ballincollig Youthreach on fire a few hundred yards further on.

A number of pallets at the side of an An Post sorting office had also been set on fire.

However, the most serious fire had broken out at the four-unit block occupied by the Durapak Agri Ltd unit. The two units occupied by the business were totally gutted, according to Mr Myers, as well as the middle unit which is occupied by the YMCA.

The firefighters managed to stop the blaze spreading to the fourth unit, which is occupied by Chip Electronics, and they also managed to save two brand new units to the rear of the building.

"A Garda scene-of-crime team was at the scene yesterday morning and the fire brigade will have its own investigation team trawl through the debris to see how the fire was started. It certainly looks very suspicious at the moment, given that we are dealing with four separate fires and the night that was in it," Mr Myers commented.

Although the fire was under control by morning, two units of the fire brigade were still at the scene yesterday afternoon keeping the area dampened down. The Durapak depot contained agricultural products such as slatted rubber and wrap net for baling silage which are difficult to extinguish once fire takes hold.