"deflagration when filling a boiler....Eight employees injured "

The importance of scrap inspection is sometimes overlooked by aluminium company and their workers. Why? They make the assumption that they will be ok if they charge a closed container, lighter, oily scrap, wet scrap, etc. Eventually, assumptions catch up to you resulting in fires, explosions, etc. Here is a recent incident highlighting the importance scrap inspection.

As the police announced one afternoon in April 2020, the accident at work happened early one afternoon while melting down metal in a company in Europe.

"According to initial findings, there was a deflagration when filling a boiler," said a spokesman for the (local) police.

Eight employees were injured in the accident. The injured were taken to hospital for treatment as a precaution.

We pray that the injured workers recovered fully from their injuries. With only 63 words to go on from the news article. We have our work in front of us. First the news article states a “deflagration” occurred. The definition of deflagration is “combustion which propagates through a gas or across the surface of an explosive at subsonic speeds, driven by the transfer of heat.”

We have to make assumptions just as the reader does. Why can a deflagration/explosion occur? From our experience in touring dozens of remelt facilities and posting many incidents explosions can include but not limited to: contaminated scrap, closed containers, lighters, wet scrap, etc.. Because the article states that it occurred “when filling a boiler”. Commonly throughout the world the term boiler and furnace are used interchangeably. We assume that the furnace door was open. If it was not, the furnace would have received damage and the news articles did not include any equipment damage. What is further confusing is we believe the company in question shreds everything. We also wonder why 8 workers were around the furnace. Lots of questions regarding this incident. We reached out to the company to ask about this incident. We pray that they respond. If they do we will update this post.

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