A huge plume of fire was spotted emanating seemingly spontaneously from the severely-polluted Bellandur lake on Friday morning. The smoke, which could be spotted from kilometres away, is being observed nearly a year after a similar plume of smoke caught the eye and invited the ire of the National Green Tribunal.
The fire was first spotted around 10 a.m., and has tempered only around mid-afternoon. However, smaller plumes of smoke from multiple places could still be seen, said Sonali Singh, who lives nearby. “It does seem like a methane burst due to the increasing pollution in the lake. There is a small centre of deep yellow flames, perhaps from the methane, and huge volumes of yellow-ish tinged smoke,” she said.
While a fire department tender was sent to the spot, the vehicle could not access the point of the fire, said officials. “We will stand on the banks as a standby. But, we cannot reach the place of the fire which is in the middle of the wetlands,” said an official.
It was in February 2017 that a similar fire had seen the NGT taking up a suo motu case, and eventually lead to pressure on the state government to formulate plans to clean up the over 700-acre lake. The lake receives over 480 million litres of raw sewage from the city daily.
