UPDATED – Powell River firefighters extinguished a fire at Catalyst Paper Corporation’s Powell River mill Sunday evening, August 18.
Dan Ouellette, Powell River’s fire chief, said about 25 members, essentially the whole department, responded to a call around 6:30 pm. “It was fairly intense to start with, but we knocked it down fairly quickly,” he said.
The fire was located next to the TMP (thermal mechanical pulp) plant, Ouellette said, which produces most of the fiber for the mill. “The fire was not in the building,” he said. “It was in the heat recovery area. From there, it grew to the point where it involved a small bridge structure that entered the building from a ramp from the outside.”
The area includes a courtyard with trees and grass that also was on fire when crews arrived, Ouellette said, as well as a decommissioned wood-stave tank that at one time would have held pulp. “Those were all on fire,” he said.
The fire jumped to the other side of the building into the grass as well, Ouellette said, but Catalyst employees were able to extinguish the flames in that area.
There are high-powered electrical lines going into the building that were badly damaged as a result of the fire, Ouellette explained. Firefighters had to step back until they were sure the power had been cut to the lines, he added. “We weren’t going to put any people anywhere near those damaged lines until we had some reasonable assurances from the mill that the power was cut,” he said. “Once they had the power down, we put our staff into those areas so we could access where the vegetation was and in and around the tanks, get in there underneath the bridge structure and get the fire totally out at that point.”
Firefighters were on scene for about three and a half hours, Ouellette said. “It was a lot of after-the-fact hard work in terms of getting people into those areas and then just getting the job done.”
Crews searched the TMP building, but didn’t find that the fire had entered the plant, Ouellette said. “However, the fire was significant enough to burn up against the side of the building and go right over the top onto the roof area, which was another area we were focusing on just to make sure the fire hadn’t got on top of the roof.”
No one was hurt in the blaze, Ouellette said, but two firefighters were taken to Powell River General Hospital as a precautionary measure after they became overheated.
Brian Johnston, Powell River mill manager, confirmed that no one was injured. He said the fire department “responded terrifically and did a great job.”
The most significant damage was to parts of the mill that haven’t been used for years, Johnston added. However, a couple of cables that provide power to parts of the plant were lost. “The cables affected our effluent sludge presses, so rather than not have them available, we elected to shut the mill down,” he said. “The action we took in response to the fire was really around making sure we lived up to our obligations to protect people, protect the environment and we’ve done the right thing.”
Staff were working on getting the mill up and running on Tuesday, August 20.
