Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service were called to the scene in Tarrant Monkton after the hopper area of a refuse vehicle set on fire on Monday (5 May).

The emergency services arrived in no more than 15 minutes and cast the vehicle’s load out onto the highway at once.

‘No-one was injured, and the quick thinking of the crew saved the lorry’, a council spokesperson said.

The council has since established that a handheld battery-powered Dyson vacuum cleaner had been wrongly disposed of in a recycling bin and was seemingly responsible for the blaze.

‘Crews do not manually sort through the contents of any bins before the waste is crushed in the back of our collection vehicles’, the council spokesperson added.

Following the incident, the local authority took to social media to issue a statement about the serious hazard posed by crushed batteries when discarded amongst flammable materials and urged residents to utilise appropriate battery-recycling facilities.

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