Jamie Betts had an explosive morning at Chemtrade Logistics on Friday.
As the plant manager he was just getting to work at 6 a.m. Friday morning for an early start on what he expected to be an exciting day. He was eager to know more about their acquisition the day before of Marsulex Chemicals, consolidating a lot of the chemical services provided to Prince George's three pulp mills. But instead, emergency alarms went off.
"We had a localized explosion inside the chlorate-4 process building," he said. "One of our employees [in an adjacent building] said it sounded like when a dumpster gets dumped, a loud bang. I couldn't hear anything from where I was outside in the parking lot."
"They didn't deem it as necessary to call us in," said Fire Chief-designate John Lane. Indeed, said Betts, it was not a dangerous scene once the shock of the explosion was over but puzzling. By Friday evening, specialists called in to determine the cause were starting to arrive.
The plant will be shut down until the blown section can be repaired and the whole system is deemed safe. That could take a few days, said Betts, but so far their disruption was having no effect on the three pulp mills in Prince George.
They supply the mills with the sodium chlorate which "is an environmentally preferred method of bleaching paper white."
What exploded was one of 84 cells in their system. Each cell is a box Betts estimated at three feet by three feet by 18 inches in size. Inside each one are anodes and cathodes which exchange an electric current through a salty brine. That process creates the bleaching chemical.
"We are not sure why one of them exploded. It is a big concern," he said. "What is most important to us, in this kind of work, is safety. Everyone at the plant was uninjured. Nobody was inside that particular building at the time, and there was no off-site impact. We were able to shut everything down quickly and it will stay shut down until we get to the bottom of this."
He said there was little mess, just a gaping rupture in the one box exposing its inner workings.
About 40 people work that the plant.
