Pollution
Humain
Environnement
Economique

At around 5:00 p.m., a fire broke out in a dryer at a 5000 m² classified industrial carpentry company subject to authorisation (category 2410). The company had an indoor stockpile of 2000 m² of timber reaching 10 m in height as well as an outdoor 15,000 m³ stockpile of logs. An employee gave the alert. Some 40 firefighters extinguished the fire with water hoses. The operations were facilitated by the adequate fire suppression systems on site. The fire was completely extinguished in the early morning of the following day.

Consequences

Eighty of the company’s employees and two outsourcing companies were temporarily laid off. The inspection authorities for classified facilities did not find any environmental impacts during its visit on 18 January. The operator informed them that it would be four weeks before the site could reopen.

Causes and circumstances of the accident

The previous Friday, the workers had emptied the silos used to feed wood into the biomass boiler in order to be ready for work the following Monday. The wood inside the boiler is burnt completely and continuously. As this occurs, the temperature inside the boiler and dryers rises. To cool them down, the doors of the dryers are opened.

The initial assumption was that the heat produced by the operations that day had not dissipated completely or evenly (only 12 of the 16 dryer doors had been opened, the four others had been blocked by pallets) and caused the wood dust inside the dryer of a veneer line to self-heat. According to the operator, the temperature rose to around 180 °C. Burning particles of wood were blown around the workshop by the ventilation system, spreading the flames and completely destroying the workshop. However, the flames spared the boiler, the company’s main item of equipment.

Post-accident measures taken

Specialist teams cleared the burnt debris from the building (metal structure, tiles, etc.). Special precautions that included setting up a cordon were taken to remove the asbestos-cement sheets from the old roof.

The asbestos removal work was halted after a visit by the labour inspectorate. The results of the air and asbestos dust analyses subsequently conducted did not show any signs of contamination.