While the air quality in Reykjavík on New Year’s Eve stayed within healthy limits, due primarily to the strong, steady winds in the area, fireworks elsewhere caused considerable damage.
South Iceland news service Sunnlenska reports that firefighters were called out some 50 times to put out brush fires resulting from fireworks, the largest one being in Tjarnabyggð, just south of Selfoss.
“I don’t remember such a great many calls on New Years before,” firefighter Lárus Kristinn Guðmundsson told reporters. “We’ve dispatched all of our stations at some point or another, except at Laugarvatn, and firefighters have been called to duty in every district; for example, our team in Þorlákshöfn has been called out to both Selfoss and Hveragerði.”
Amongst the damage done was the destruction of a windmill in Þykkvabær. There were at one point two such windmills, the other one being destroyed in 2017, also the result of a fire.
As such, firefighters were kept extremely busy on New Year’s Eve combating these blazes, as an unseasonably dry winter has made conditions particularly flammable, let alone with the presence of fireworks added to the mix.
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