Photo by kconnors via morgueFile.com
At about 1:15 p.m., firefighters from multiple departments are responding to a report of a fire in a dust collector at a business in the 8600 block of 198th Avenue, Bristol.
Units from the following departments are responding: Bristol, Salem, Paris and Pleasant Prairie.
UPDATE 1:26 p.m. — Deputies and village crews blocking of 198th Avenue.
very common….. and uneventful.. I just wish they would not call them dust fires. The dust may be the initial fuel but the bags are what burn… put in fire resistant bags, put shutters on the fans and most fires will not go beyond a smolder.
Dust explosions are dangerous and under reaction and over reaction come from not keeping fires and explosions separated in our heads.
@Tim – There is a very important principle in industrial safety, where managers are supposed to investigate near miss incidents, because they aare all too often warnings that a larger, nastier incident is possible if corrective action is not taken.
As for dust collector fires, if the dust is non-combustible – like portland cement – then about all that can burn is the bags / filters. If you have a combustible dust, there is the very real potential for a fire in the dusty air cloud inside the collector, and without fire suppression equipment, such fires have been know to propagate back upstream faster than the dusty air flows to the collector.
Look at the CSB’s website for a post-mortem of a deadly fire at an aluminum wheel manufacturer in Indiana.
Don’t expect the general media to distinguish between a fireball or flash-fire and an explosion, because in reality, the only difference is whether there was some confinement of the pressure wave from the flame-front.