Pollution
Humain
Environnement
Economique

The silo foreman noticed smoke when opening the site at around 8 a.m. The staff then noticed a fire in the cereal by-products bin at the separator outlet. The bin had been filled the day before during a sunflower seed transilage and cleaning operation. The loading hopper was filled up at around 8:00 p.m.

In an attempt to combat the fire, the staff fired an extinguisher into the bin and moved it far away from the buildings. Upon their arrival, the firefighters sprayed down the dumpster to extinguish the remaining embers. Once the fire was under control, the foreman and the emergency services used a thermal camera to inspect the silo. This inspection revealed burning embers in the drop box under the separator/sorter and at the base of the elevator upstream from the separator. The separator downstream showed no visible signs of anomaly (without disassembly). The rest of the handling chain was inspected as a safety measure, and the loading hopper, which had been filled the day before, was emptied. No additional hot spots were detected, and the activity was resumed. A new outbreak of fire was observed the following day at about 5 p.m., in the filtration system that was out of service on the downstream elevator.

The consequences of this fire were :

  • combustion of all the bag filters and internal deterioration of the filtration unit;
  • deterioration of the buckets on the upstream elevator;
  • deterioration of the buckets on the downstream elevator, the conveyor belt and the starwheel at the top of the elevator;

The repairs cost 60,000 €.

As it turns out, the shaft of the starwheel at the top of the upstream elevator had moved, causing the conveyor belt to shift and the generation of heat through friction. The belt’s deviation detector had malfunctioned and was thus did not stop the handling operation.

The operator replaced the belts’ electromagnetic sensor type deviation detectors with an electromechanical detection system.