Fire broke out around 12:20 pm inside a biofuel unit designed to transform oilseed. The blaze was located around the granulating machine’s worm feeder, between its buffer hopper (2-3 m³) and mixer. Technicians called in fire-fighters, shut down the process and drained circuits both upstream and downstream of the granulating assembly (i.e. buffer hopper, worm feeder and mixer). These steps served to contain the fire to just the worm feeder and hopper.

This outbreak was caused by heating of a substance during extended granulating machine downtime (2 hours) following a mechanical malfunction. In the event of such malfunction, the trituration process was still not shut off, as the oilseed cake was simply deviated upstream of the machine hopper and directly rerouted into coolers downstream of the machine. The hopper, worm feeder and mixer were all turned off while being full ; the hot cakes (fresh from the press) present in the feeder and hopper heated up and ignited.

Since damage was limited to these two pieces of equipment, production was able to continue.

The facility operator implemented a series of organisational and technical measures to prevent recurrence of this heating phenomenon: should the granulating machine be taken offline for more than 15 min, the entire machine assembly was to be completely drained. Temperature sensors, connected to the plant’s supervisory post and sound alarms, were to be installed at various points on the machine in order to control the potential heating of a substance.