Pollution
Humain
Environnement
Economique

At around 11 a.m., a fire broke out in a plant manufacturing chemical coatings for construction materials. The fire occurred in the plant’s dust collector on the powder coating production unit. This dust collector continuously draws in organic dust from additives composed of flammable products: cellulose ether, animal protein, starch, and polyvinyl alcohol. This dust was consumed inside the unit, first emitting a burning smell at around 11 a.m., and then a thick smoke was released through the outlet of the dust collector at around 12:45 p.m. The foreman shut down the equipment, evacuated the 70 employees from the site, confined the workshop and alerted the emergency services. Upon their arrival to the site at about 1 p.m., the emergency services opened the smoke extraction hatches, disconnected the site’s power supply and used 2 fire nozzles to spray down the dust collector. The intervention ended at around 1:30 p.m. The extinguishing water was recovered by pumping and dispersing of absorbent materials. The dust collector was monitored until the following day.

Only property damage was reported. Although the dust collector was unavailable, powder coating production operations were able to be partially resumed the same day (without continuous dust extraction).

Two hours before the incident, welding work by an external company had been carried out on the unit while it was still in operation. The operations consisted in welding a protective element on the external wall of the unit to improve safety in the workplace. The increase in temperature induced by the welding operations would have caused the dust to burn.