A fire at Catalyst Paper Corporation’s Powell River division shut down two paper machines for a few weeks.
The blaze broke out in a cable equipment tray on Friday, May 20. The company’s No. 9 paper machine was idled until last week and the No. 10 paper machine is expected to be down until the end of this week.
Rick Maksymetz, manager of the Powell River division, said no one was hurt. “It wasn’t a big fire, but where it happened, it surgically did a lot of damage because of the impact on the electronic cable trays,” he said.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
About a dozen Powell River firefighters responded to the fire, said Deputy Chief Terry Peters. “It was very troublesome to fight that fire, for the mill crews and ourselves,” he said. “It obviously got pretty hot in there and did some significant damage to the electrical components of the machines.”
There was quite a bit of smoke, Peters added, so that area in the mill had to be evacuated and power had to be shut down. “Once it was safe and all people were accounted for, we managed to get into the nitty-gritty of the electrical trays and extinguish it.”
Mill crews did an exceptional job shutting things down, Peters said, to move into an attack mode on the fire. “Safety is also paramount in electrical fires. You just can’t spray water onto electrical lines. They did the best they could with what they had before they evacuated the building and our crews took over from there.”
