Inside a pyrotechnic production plant, black powder ignited suddenly during the pelleting step. Personnel working in the vicinity of the black powder pellet-making unit heard a deaf sound. The first person arriving on the scene noticed that the door to the unit was open, the pellet-making machine shut off and a few black powder capsules strewn on the floor on both sides of the bin for finished products.

Friction on a punch press would have caused the blaze, which remained confined to the pellets already produced and undergoing compression (witnessed by powder in the intact hopper). The automatic quenching system, which was still operational, did not activate.

The operator moved the fire detection unit to allow detecting the onset of fire at an earlier point in time. He moreover increased the compression tooling inspection frequency, modified the hopper in order to limit its physical capacity to just that authorised by the workplace safety report, and lastly moved the pellet machine activation control to a location outside the facility’s Z1 zone.