At around 3:30 p.m., an explosion followed by a fire occurred on the feeder system of a biomass incinerator at a laminate manufacturing plant. Several conveyor hatches were blown open, with some damaging the building’s siding. The fasteners on two conveyors, attached by spacers, were torn off the wall shared with the silo. A fire broke out in the hydraulic unit of the briquetting machines and in the silos. The incinerator did not have any visible signs of damage.

The operator implemented the site’s internal emergency plan. The firefighters set up a cordon around the site and all 55 employees were evacuated. The gendarmes cut off the D660 road and diverted traffic. In accordance with procedure, the operator manually shut off all the site’s utilities. This emergency stop turned off the sprinklers that had activated in one of the silos. Using three hoses, the firefighters contained the fire at around 6:15 p.m. The silo was flooded with foam. As the fire occurred downstream of the firewater containment pond, the firewater used to fight the blaze seeped into the ground. A boiler plant technician, badly shaken by the explosion, was taken to hospital and discharged at the end of the day.

The boiler plant’s operation had been outsourced until the operator took over, a year before the fire. The biomass and shredded material are conveyed by gravity, which generates dust. Currently, there is no specific procedure for cleaning the conveyors and they are not equipped with a dust extraction system. The silos and conveyors are not equipped with a hot-spot detection system.

Two silo fires occurred here in 2015 (ARIA 48241 and ARIA 46648) and a similar explosion occurred in 2014 (ARIA 45278).