At around 9:30 a.m., an employee noticed smoke coming out of a 60 tonne dryer connected to a sunflower-seed silo. The site’s employees were evacuated. The heat set off the fire detection system (temperature sensors), which sounded an alarm that closed the dryer’s ventilation louvres and cut off its gas and electricity supplies. The public firefighters were alerted at around 9:50 a.m. The employees found a hot spot at the bottom of the drying column. The dryer’s spray system was turned on and the sunflower seeds were discharged via the slide gate located above the dry-grain hopper. The firefighters used a nozzle to extinguish the combustion point located downstream of the slide gate. They then checked for remaining hot spots with a thermographic camera. The sunflower seeds in the dry-grain hopper, which could not be discharged via the slide gate and which were laden with extinguishing water, were sucked out using a mobile vacuum system. The public firefighters conducted a final check of the dryer’s temperature, then left at 12:15 p.m. The silo workers monitored the dryer during the afternoon.

According to the operator, the high moisture content of the sunflower seeds (due to the weather conditions) caused the seeds to clump up between the dryer’s frames, overheat locally, and catch fire. The operator instituted a pricing policy to encourage farmers to harvest sunflower seeds quickly and thereby ensure their quality and moisture content. A similar fire had occurred on the site in November 2012 (see 42995).