Around 5 pm, an agricultural silo manager noticed a burning smell, first at the base then from the top of 2 dryers. He shut down the 2 installations, closed the LPG feed valves, stopped the silo’s general handling and suction functions and notified the fire department as well as the company’s regional manager. With smoke being emitted from the top of one of the dryers, a search was made of any eventual flashpoints. The contents of the dryer were finally drained to the floor by means of “quick emptying” hatches located on each side of the drying column, exposing charred corn pellets during rapid flow. The fire-fighters sprayed water in the grain drying column, from the dryer’s fire column, in order to extinguish the burned corn blocks that had remained on the dihedra approx. 3 m above the extraction grating. The lower part of this drying installation was then emptied into a gate flowing directly into a skip, with the assistance of the cereal transporter (having first removed its top) and then placed under fire-fighter surveillance; the grains were emptied into the site’s courtyard. Fire-fighters had completed their intervention by around 8 pm.

No property damage was reported, but roughly 50 kilograms of grains were completely burnt. No foreign component was found when collecting and sorting the corn stored on the floor. The dryer, which had been operating continuously for 5 days, was first cleaned by a subcontractor and the corn was cleansed prior to drying. The fire probes revealed no heating or temperature in excess of guidelines (70°C). A slight colouring of the metal dihedra at the periphery of the grain column, on the lower hot air inlet side, points to where the fire originated; this localisation might explain why fire probes on the exhaust air side did not react prior to fire detection by the silo manager. The operator assumed that elements had accumulated at this point by means of segregation during the cereal descent into the column, thereby creating a static “plug” that overheated before igniting. The operator planned on verifying grain cleaning system efficiency upstream of drying. Effective facility monitoring made it possible to detect the fire outbreak at a very early stage.