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Baltimore
Huge fire engulfs fish factory in Co Cork
No casualties have been reported but the building is said to be destroyed.
EMERGENCY SERVICES ARE dealing with a fire at a fish processing factory in the Co Cork village of Baltimore.
The Irish Seafood Company building has been destroyed by the fire but Cork County Fire Service has said that it was evacuated and that everyone has been accounted for with no casualties reported.
Four fire brigade units were sent to the scene along with seven fire tenders.
The units were sent from Bantry, Schull and Skibbereen with further units en route from Skibbereen.
As well as the factory itself being evacuated, the nearby Rath National School was also evacuated due to the danger of fumes.
Principal Maura Collins spoke to C103’s Cork Today show about the evacuation saying that all the students have now left the school.
“There was no danger of fire in the school, it was just the fumes, which are getting quite toxic and are increasingly getting worse. So what we’ve done is on health and safety grounds we’ve decided to evacuate the children out of here,” she said.
We were just keeping everything nice and calm here because if that element of panic creeps into the children things can go bad very quickly. So what we did was we got children back to their classrooms, some of them had been out playing sport, we sent a text to parents and people came immediately or almost immediately.
Collins added that the staff will now be leaving the school.
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