Fire at Maine Wood Pellets plant

[scajjr2]

Blaze at Athens wood pellet manufacturer leads to firefighter injury, building damages

A Cornville firefighter was taken to a Skowhegan hospital Wednesday evening with an airway injury he suffered while fighting a fire at Maine Woods Pellet Co. in Athens.

www.centralmaine.com

sam

 

[peakbagger]

Pellet plants tend to burn. Making them fire-resistant costs money and they are low margin operations. I think most owners balance cost for occasional fires against the costs required to upgrade so they do not burn.

 

[stoveliker]

Or balance cost between higher insurance premiums versus cost to upgrade?
Or are these not generally insured? (Talk about job volatility working for an uninsured fuel producer...)

 

[peakbagger]

I used to work in tissue papermill on very high speed machine (6300 Feet Per minute). It could get dusty and that dust went everywhere. It was in multistory building and the crews really could not get at lot fo the roof an wall steel. We had fire sprinker's all over the place but even we had fires on occasion. My guess is a wood pellet plant had lots of ducts moving super fine and dry powder around and that is a hard risk to deal with.

At one point I worked at a place that made cellulose floc (finely ground paper), its used in pills, and food (grated cheese usually has some in it to keep it from caking), welding rods and dog and cat food (used to bulk up the food so owners dont overfeed their pet). It was a super fine powder and we had lots of dust collection ducting. It had isolation dampers and explosion dampers in lots of places. There was fire suppression but the operators really avoided using it as once the powder got wet it set up like concrete.

Not sure if Athens has changed much in 10 years but I was there one day looking at their new (at the time) Organic Rankine Cycle plant. I didnt have lot of time to roam but it looked like it was a plant assembled over the years versus a clean sheet one. Not sure how they deal with insurance, when I worked for papermills we worked with an industry risk insurer like FM GFlobal and they did audits and made recommendations. We had insurance but the deductible was quite high.

 

[blades]

static spark and dust makes big boom. a few years back couple of silos went up as they were cleaning them. a former customer, pallet mfg. sparks from something into pile of saw dust. nothing noticed Fri night but early Sunday morning a person walking his dog noticed smoke and called fire dept. pretty good blaze by time they arrived. pole barn type construction. melted one wall .

 

[peakbagger]

A mythbusters classic on dust explosions