Scrap metal fire Wednesday fills Central Southwest Baltimore with smoke; no injuries reported
A fire at a scrap metal yard Wednesday afternoon sent giant plumes of smoke and whiffs of burnt steel around Baltimore but did not injure any workers or firefighters.
The fire started at Berg Recycling in the 1400 block of West Hamburg Street near Bayard Street in the Pigtown/Washington Village neighborhood, west of M&T Bank Stadium, around 1:35 p.m., Baltimore City Fire Department spokesperson Kevin Cartwright said. The two-alarm fire spread to a vacant warehouse adjacent to the metal yard, Cartwright said, and was extinguished by 3:15 p.m.
“There was a lot of recyclable metals and steel inside the yard that was resting against that building and as it burned, it burned a big hole in the wall,” Cartwright said. “The metals were spread out throughout the yard, but there was a large pile against the warehouse, and that’s where a lot of the heavy burning was.”
The Office of Emergency Management urged residents near Wicomico and Bush streets to close their windows and doors as smoke filled the area.
Berg Recycling advertises turning scrap metal into cash and accepts a wide range of metals and materials, including appliances, electric motors, junk vehicles, lead acid batteries, steel and rebar, according to its website.
The business’s third-generation owner, Adam Berg, said the blaze was “just an inventory fire” that didn’t go inside his facility, but likely burned some insulation materials, causing the heavy smoke. Berg, who said he wasn’t at the facility when the fire broke out but was at the scene when reached by The Baltimore Sun, said he took over his family’s business roughly two years ago.
The recycling company was ordered to pay a $22,000 penalty to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this January following an inspection several years ago where regulators alleged the business failed to comply with the conditions of its pollution discharge permit. The federal agency alleged the scrap recycler violated the Clean Water Act by “failing to implement and document corrective actions” as well as failing to implement “appropriate control measures,” maintain “good housekeeping” or provide required employee training.
Berg said he was not running the business yet when the violations were logged in 2021, which he described as a shaky in-between period of management following his father’s 2018 death. He described the penalty as “administrative,” saying that it was generally related to record-keeping regulations that previous ownership hadn’t followed strictly enough.
The fire caused the LocalLink 26 bus to detour between Bayard and Severn Street, according to the Maryland Transit Administration. The Maryland Department of the Environment responded to the blaze “in a support role,” the agency said.
Baltimore Sun reporter Christine Condon contributed to this article.
