At around 11.10 p.m., the shift foreman at a linen factory smelt a suspicious odour. Immediately afterwards, a technician saw flames at the level of the spinning reel and big wheel of one of the production lines. He actuated the emergency stoppage switch. Employees used extinguishers to try to extinguish the flames from above, since access to the cellar was impossible due to the smoke. When the fire could not be controlled, the operator called the fire department and evacuated the employees. The emergency responders faced problems evacuating the smoke, notably because of two smoke vents that had not opened.

The fire caused extensive material damage, notably to the factory’s electrical networks, machinery, compressed air system and part of the cellar concrete structure. The factory was shut down for several months and 80 people were on short-time work. The water used for extinguishing fire was stored in the cellar used as a retention system and then sucked up and treated by a specialised firm.

The most likely assumption to explain this outbreak of fire is that material was apparently accumulated at the exit of line T3 in the cellar at the level of the head beater funnels. The material would have heated through rubbing with a belt and caught fire. Moreover, fibre had to be located nearby, and this would have propagated the fire up to the level of the big wheel and the hydroelectric generating set of lines 3 and 4

Following this outbreak of fire, the operator planned to:

• adopt a procedure for cleaning in the cellar;
• if possible, move the hydroelectric generating sets from the cellar or eliminate them and replace them with take-up rollers;
• install a camera surveillance system in the cellar with retransmission to the work stations at the line exit;
• install smoke detectors;
• have the exhaust dry risers inspected every year or every two years by the facility’s fire department;
• repair the defective smoke vents.