"The fire broke out just after six in a sawing installation..."

Many aluminium companies fail to realize or acknowledge how dangerous the practice of using flammable hydraulic fluids in machinery is. Thankfully, no was injured in the following incident.

A European smelter reported a fire broke out one evening in February 2019. The fire was reported to have raged in a sawing installation in the foundry, the fire brigade reported.

Two local fire departments with two fire-fighting vehicles and a platform responded to the fire.

This video has been posted for the reader to understand that hydraulic fires are large fires. We have known of several facilities that burned down because of a hydraulic fire.

Black smoke clouds were released during the fire. According to the fire brigade, there are no more people in the industrial hall where the fire is raging.

According to the fire department, leaking hydraulic oil caught fire. First the voltage was removed from the installation, then the fire brigade extinguishes with foam. The fire was extinguished two and half hours later in the evening.

Thankfully no was injured in this fire. We chose not to list the company name nor location because we are unsure what the tone of our introduction. Our goal is not to place blame on the company. We post these incidents to prevent recurrence of these incidents. Regardless, we included the following video of the fire for the reader to understand that these oil based hydraulic fires can be very severe. The APSB has posted incidents in the past that resulted in great facility damage, and workers being injured. We pray that this smelter will investigate switching out all of their oil based hydraulic fluids to a non-flammable material.

The Aluminium Times had an article about this topic because there have been so many recent incidents involving this specific hazard. It can be downloaded here.

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