Firefighters worked for nearly two hours to put out a large tire fire at a recycling facility on the edge of Biltmore Village early Thursday morning.
The call came in at about 4:30 a.m. A pile of tires, debris and brush had caught fire at the back of the Biltmore Iron and Metal Co., almost under the McDowell Street Bridge.
"This was definitely a pretty large fire," said Asheville Fire Department spokeswoman Kelly Klope. "That's mainly because we couldn't get to it quickly enough to extinguish it right away."
When firefighters arrived at the recycling company at about 4:45 a.m., she said, they couldn't get their trucks into the positions that they wanted because iron scraps and other debris were in the way. Firefighters positioned a fire engine on the McDowell Street Bridge to spray the flames from the air, while ground crews worked to hold the fire at bay and prevent it from spreading while they waited for a backhoe operator to arrive to clear the way for them to get closer to the blaze, Klope said.