A "dust explosion" ripped through the Pacific Bioenergy pellet plant early Friday evening.
No one was injured but the plant, at 9988 Willow Cale Forest Service Road at the south end of the BCR Industrial Site, has been knocked out of commission for the time being, company spokesman Kevin Brown said.
However, the 40 employees at the plant will continue to report for work.
"There's always work to be done around a wood pellet manufacturing plant and, of course, with the weather being so nice, now is a good time to get to some of those little projects around the site that the guys haven't had a chance to get to in awhile," Brown said.
Seventeen firefighters from three halls were called to the scene shortly before 7 p.m. and remained there for about five hours making sure the several spot fires that had broke out were extinguished.
The precise cause and location of the explosion was still to be determined, but assistant fire chief Blake King described the incident as a "dust explosion" in which there is a build up of dust that's detonated by a spark of some kind.
Damage was extensive, although a dollar figure was still to be calculated, but could have been worse if not for activation of the plant's sprinkler system by the blast. It blew out part of the sheet-metal wall on the main building.
The site has been cordoned off and clean up crews and investigators were on the scene Saturday, Brown said, who added further details probably won't be available until early in the next work week.
"The objective is to get the plant back operating as soon as possible but before we know when that'll happen we need to know what the cause was and how to fix it so that whatever the cause was of last night's incident doesn't occur again," he said.
It's the third time in 32 months firefighters have been called to Pacific Bioenergy.
On March 31, 2008, the operation suffered two simultaneous blasts, one that blew open the doors on the bag house, a filtration chamber outside the pellet plant, and and another that blew out the main plant's metal wall, similar to what occurred Friday.
And in over the August 2009 long weekend, they were called in to extinguish a fire in the hopper and piping. The plant was shut down at the time but firefighters suspect the hopper was still hot and the source of the fire.
No injuries were reported in either incident.
The plant has been operating since 1994 and in 2007 went through a $15-million upgrade and expansion in 2007 and has been in the process of going through a further $24-million expansion, meant to double the facility's production and slated for completion in June 2011.
