Fires

 

 As mentioned in the “Background” section, children go through the dump site and melt the plastic off of electrical cords in order to get the metals within, typically copper. They usually do this by creating small fires, often using refridgerator parts for fuel. They then sell the copper wires, as well as other metals they find such as aluminum, brass and zinc, batteries and engines, at the adjacent scrap metal market. The images above, taken from a photo essay in The Caravan, show us up close the dangerous and uncontrolled conditions in which these fires are being burned and to which the dump sites scavengers are being exposed.



As seen from the image above from the Journal of Health and Pollution, the burning site is in the southernmost part of the dumpsite, which is outlined in red. We examined this area using Google Earth’s Digital Globe imagery from December of 2012, shown below. One can see the smoke from various fires in the burn location.



We wanted to see if these fires were detectable using remote sensing. We used the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), which utilizes NASA MODIS imagery and downloaded a 7 day history of fires in Northern and Central Africa. We used an equal area projection to display the fires on ArcMap, which is shown below. No fires were detected in the Agbogbloshie dumpsite, which is located on the coast within the Greater Accra area. This is not surprising considering the small size of the fires at the dumpsite, which are controlled and have never lead to a massively destructive fire.