In a polyamide fibre manufacturing plant, a fire broke out at around 12.30 pm in a finishing machine on the 4th floor of the polymerisation building. The emergency response team contained the fire. When the external emergency services arrived, the fire had been extinguished. The coolant was drained, and monitoring was continued until 3.11 pm. During the visit by the inspection authorities for classified facilities on 4/09, the operator put forward the following explanations: after a holiday period during which maintenance and servicing work had not been carried out, the plant had resumed its activities on 9/08. On 15/08, the electrical installations malfunctioned. Indeed, the transformer station housing 3 transformers including 2 operating continuously. The third only started up when a much higher electric intensity was required. The startup of a compressor required a higher intensity than the 2 transformers, but the 3rd which usually starts up automatically, did not start up because the connection to the network had not been carried out correctly following maintenance operations. Therefore, the installation tripped. The emergency generator started up correctly, but a circuit breaker kept tripping, and the power supply was intermittent. The staff were unable to solve this problem. The decision to shut down production line POLY 1 was made 1 1/2 hours later, then 3 hours later, line POLY 2 was also shut down. The plant found itself shut down. Restart of the plant could only be considered after cleaning the 2 production lines: polymerised N salt was found in the reactor of line POLY 1 and in the POLY 2 finishing machine (certain items of equipment including the screw).

The amount of polymer in POLY 1 was estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 kg. The operator considered eliminating this polymer by hydrolysis using a caprolactam, adipic acid and water mixture. This operation took place with no problems, the solid product obtained collected in a bin was sent for incineration. On line POLY 2, the screw located in the finishing machine had to be cleaned along with various related parts. An external company carried out this cleaning by high-temperature incineration. However, polymer had solidified close to the dismantled screw. On 31/08, operators in the control room noticed smoke at that location. The amount of polymer burned was estimated at a few kg, and the damages caused were minimal.

An employee pointed out that the dismantled screw was hot (200 °C) and that it had rotated whilst rubbing against the degraded polymer. The inspection authority asked the operator to draw up a report of the events and propose the establishment of a set of provisions aiming to reduce the likelihood of occurrence of the failures noted and their possible environmental consequences.