fire, explosion after "glob of hot metal was pulled into a hopper...."

The collection of grindings, shavings, cuttings, etc. in our plants occurs on a daily basis with little notice. Sometimes the collection becomes a housekeeping issue if the containers are not removed on regular basis. Here is a recent incident:

A fire at an aluminium foundry in the Eastern USA had over 100 evacuate early one morning during the week of December 11, 2016, according to a local fire department.

The fire department were notified of an incident at the aluminium casting foundry around 3:30 p.m. When crews arrived, they discovered a fire resulting from a dust explosion in a hopper used for collecting metal shavings.

The fire was put out and the hopper was put out of service. The fire was contained to the hopper and didn’t damage the building.

The facility was shut down and over 115 employees were evacuated for an hour.

Investigators discovered that a glob of hot metal was pulled into the hopper causing the fire. Damage is estimated at $2,500.

There were no injuries.

The Aluminium Plant Safety Blog is glad that no one was injured in this incident. We chose to omit this company’s name and location because this plant had experienced a previous dust explosion that resulted injured several workers. A common attribute to large explosions or fires is that previous smaller incidents occurred but they were not properly investigate for their root causes. We hope this incident will be properly investigated and either procedures will be altered or engineering controls will eliminate the potential for molten metal to come into contact in the bins containing aluminium fines/dust/grindings, etc.

The Aluminium Times had an article about the topic of housekeeping a while ago.

Please comment.