OWYHEE COUNTY, Idaho — First responders battled a fire at the US Ecology Site in Owyhee County, near Grandview, on Saturday afternoon.
Officials said the fire was started after a chemical reaction happened in a container at the site's landfill but did not state how the chemical reaction was started or what chemicals caused the fire.
The Owyhee County Sheriff's Office said the fire was first called in at 2:37 p.m. and the Grandview Volunteer Fire Department was at the scene until the evening.
According to officials, crews will continue to monitor the site 24/7 until they're confident that there are no other hot spots that could reignite and there won't be further problems.
The smoke is not hazardous so there were no evacuations, according to the sheriff's office.
"As soon as we arrived on site we had people monitoring what was going on and looking at what possible exposures could be there," Vice President of Operations Terry Geis said. "We have lots of very sophisticated instrumentation to do air monitoring specifically and we've been doing that this afternoon and evening just to make sure there's nothing that would create any problems for anybody outside of our property."
US Ecology Site officials told KTVB that the only person who was there at the time of the fire was a security guard.
Several viewers contacted the KTVB newsroom about hearing explosions at the US Ecology Site, but officials can only confirm there was a fire at the site.