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Fire hits ethanol plant
Published 8:29am Tuesday, March 9, 2010A fire in the ductwork of one of the buildings at the Otter Ail Ag Enterprises Ethanol Plant didn’t stop production, thanks to the quick action of the Fergus Falls Fire Department and the skillful cooperation of plant employees and management.
At 12:53 a.m. today, the fire station received a call from the plant saying there was a fire at the plant’s dryer building. The firefighters sent two trucks – a ladder truck and a pumper truck – to the scene. “When we pulled up (to the building),” said Fire Department Chief Mark Hovland, “there was so much smoke and steam there that we couldn’t even see the area.” The firefighters had to use their thermal imaging cameras to see what the problem was.
At the ethanol plant, the bio-byproducts (like corn residue) of the fuel are sorted into wet and dry stores and then sold to various enterprises. The stores are dried in the dryer room in an apparatus that acts kind of like a very large clothes dryer. A natural gas heater is housed in a small apparatus outside of the main building, and it is connected to the main building through two large ducts – one for hot air entering the dryer room, and the other for hot air exiting it. The air is kept flowing by a fan in another part of the ductwork. As the air flows into the dryer building (and out of the building to avoid a buildup of heat), the byproducts are tossed around in the large drying machine.
This morning, the fan got out of balance and stopped running. The equipment has a failsafe that turns off the heater when the fan stops, but the air in the ducts was still extremely hot – enough so that it warped the stainless steel that made up part of the ductwork. Inside of the ducts, an oily byproduct of the hot air coats the walls (which the plant cleans twice a year). When the air stopped moving and heated up even more, this byproduct caught on fire. “It was almost like a chimney (fire),” said Hovland. At this point, the equipment released steam into the area to help quench the flames, and it was this steam that the firefighters saw upon arriving on the scene.
After the firefighters determined that the flames were located inside of the ducts, they told the plant managers on the scene to shut off the steam, allowing them, with some help and direction from some of the plant’s maintenance workers, to access the heater. They sprayed water into three different openings in the ductwork to beat the flames back. Then, when they had located the source of the flames, they entered the larger part of the ductwork itself to finish the fire off. They pulled back into the fire station at 4:50 a.m.
There were no injuries, and no products from the plant were destroyed. Firefighters from Elizabeth were on the scene to help for about two hours. The plant will be deep-cleaning the ductwork of the dryer today and estimating what will need to be repaired and replaced. They did not stop producing ethanol at any time, nor will they need to.
Hovland emphasized that all of the failsafe equipment at the plant worked exactly as it was supposed to, and he said the fire was not due to poor maintenance of any kind on the plant’s part. “It was just a fluky thing that happened,” he said. In fact, Hovland said that if it wasn’t for the help of the plant employees, it would have been much harder to put the fire out. “I was pleased with their expertise,” he said. “We have to work with them because they have knowledge of the plant.”
