One man suffered third-degree burns and two other employees were injured in an explosion at a wood pellet plant in Burns Lake on Thursday.
Leroy Reitsma, president of Pinnacle Renewable Energy plant said a "fire-related incident" happened at the Burns Lake mill, located on Highway 16 east of Burns Lake, at around 8 a.m. He said the fire broke out inside of some equipment used to dry wood fibre and it caused an explosion.
One employee suffered serious third-degree burns, he said, while two others are being treated for minor burns. He would not elaborate on the gender or ages of the victims.
BC Ambulance, however, said one patient was transferred to Burns Lake hospital in critical condition, while two others were taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries.
Reitsma said the explosion happened during a routine maintenance shutdown and the company is working with WorkSafeBC to investigate what happened.
WorkSafeBC received a call shortly after 9 a.m. about three employees being injured in an explosion and have sent two investigators to the scene, said Scott McCloy, a spokesman for the work safety agency.
Babine Lake First Nation Chief Wilf Adam went to the hospital after the heard about the explosion because several First Nation members work at the mill. He witnessed one young man being brought in on a stretcher, while two other young men walked into the hospital with facial injuries. He did not know the men with the facial injuries, but said they appeared not to be seriously injured.
"Two of the men looked really young, and they had bandages on their faces, but they looked like they were OK," he said, Thursday morning.
Adam did not know how many employees worked at the mill and said he couldn't comment on what the working conditions are like at the plant.
Mounties were called out shortly before 9 a.m. to the mill where three employees had been seriously injured in a blast, according to RCMP Cpl. Dave Tyreman. He said the plant was evacuated, adding that about 30 employees there at the time of the fire and were taken to a safe area.
The cause of the fire is unknown and RCMP and WorkSafeBC will continue to investigate.
The Burns Lake plant was last inspected on June 17, and no problems were found, said McCloy, adding that "combustible dust issues were being managed."
However, the company has been fined on several occasions over safety issues. In May, the Pinnacle pellet plant in Burns Lake was fined $48,483 for a failed safety inspection in December related to combustible dust, while its plant in Strathnaver south of Prince George was fined $36,223, also for safety lapses. Its plant in Quesnel was fined $31,380 following an inspection in May.
The fines were revealed in a Vancouver Sun report in August that showed seven of 10 wood pellet manufacturers failed WorkSafeBC inspections, according to information obtained through a freedom of information request.
Other pellet plants that have received stop work orders over safety concerns are Okanagan Pellet in West Kelowna and Pacific Bio-Energy in Prince George.
Pellet plants use wood shavings and sawdust that are compressed into pellets, which are used to fire boilers that produce electricity and steam, or are burned in wood stoves for heat.
An explosion caused extensive damage at Pacific Bioenergy's pellet plant in Prince George in December 2010, where dust was cited as a factor ignited by a spark. That incident followed back-to-back explosions that rocked the pellet plant in March 2008.
WorkSafeBC has been conducting periodic inspection blitzes after explosions at two sawmills after explosions killed four workers and injured dozens of others in 2012.
The safety agency's focus has mainly been on sawmills -- which are showing some improvement in handling dust -- but the chief safety agency has also been checking other wood plants.
Pellet plants have experienced explosions in the past, but no workers had been injured until now.
The Canadian Wood Pellet Association and The B.C. Forest Safety Council are working together to improve dust safety with the formation of a committee that includes all pellet manufacturers in B.C. A workshop in dust safety was held recently in Prince George.
The B.C. government inspected the Pinnacle mill as recently as mid-June, said Jobs Minister Shirley Bond, who oversees WorkSafe BC and implemented recent government changes to mill inspection procedures.
"The most recent inspection of this particular Pinnacle facility was actually done at the end of June and they were found to be in compliance," Bond told reporters at the legislature on Thursday.
"They have in the past at this mill been issued a fine. That was based on an inspection done in June 2013. The most recent inspection was done in the middle of June 2014 and no penalties were issued at that time."
The government now has two dedicated inspectors who will began examining pellet mills in the province on a monthly basis on Oct. 1, said Bond.
That came after a report by government-appointed reviewer Gord Macatee into inspection problems at the province's WorkSafe BC branch, which led to a lack of charges at other mill explosions, said Bond.
"There are 10 facilities in the province and we recognized after the Macatee report there needed to be a focused initiative to deal with pellet plants," said Bond.
"I don't want to speculate on what happened here. I'm told that the mill was actually in maintenance mode at the time of the incident."
Recent WorkSafe BC changes mean that if inspectors find any suggestion of possible charges due to the Pinnacle explosion that a separate investigative team will be brought in to preserve evidence related to pursuing that charge, said Bond.
"I wish I could promise to British Columbians today that we would not have workplace incidents," said Bond. "I wish I could do that and sadly I can't. What I can do is ensure the process we have in place creates the safest workplaces possible and when there is a tragic or unfortunate incident that we investigate it property and make sure there are consequences when appropriate to employers."
- with files from Gordon Hoekstra
