A fire broke out on a gear motor of a cooker in the poultry unit of a rendering plant at around 1:00 p.m. The flames spread to the nearby cable trays and a small portion of the cooker’s insulation. The smoke and flames set off the automatic fire detection system, alerting the on-call technician. While waiting for the firefighters to arrive, the employees cut off the power supply, opened the smoke vents, and attacked the fire with two water hoses for 10 minutes. By the time the firefighters arrived, the fire was out. Nevertheless, they checked the cooker’s insulation for hot spots and completely stripped off the insulation to ensure that none were remaining.

The fire damage to the cable trays meant that five of the six cookers in the poultry unit had to be shut down. Repairs were made and the unit was operational again two days later. The plant suffered €32,000 in material damage and €11,500 in operating losses. The 100 kg of burnt electrical wiring was sent to a recycling facility. The cooker’s mineral wool insulation was sent away to be treated. The plant’s wastewater treatment unit treated 1 m³ of the extinguishing water used to put out the fire.

The poultry cooking unit was not operating when the accident occurred. That morning, maintenance had been performed on the cooker to replace its cable gland. This work involved removing the gear motor and performing heating and grinding operations. When the maintenance technicians finished their work, they checked for hot spots and doused the cooker before leaving for lunch.

However, these post-hot work checks proved to be insufficient. Despite the dousing, embers smouldered at a spot unnoticed by the maintenance operators. In addition, production technicians present during the lunch break had not been trained in hot spot monitoring.

Following the accident, the operator revised its procedures to stress the importance of post-hot work monitoring. It wrote special instructions and provides them to each maintenance technician.