North Vancouver city and district firefighters were on the scene of Richardson International’s waterfront grain terminal to put out a fire late Wednesday night.
The fire began burning in the facility’s pellet plant outside the easternmost end of its original silos, around 10:45 p.m. causing smoke to billow into the sky.
“There is some electrical equipment that appears to have overheated and caught on fire. It was a tricky spot to get into,” said City of North Vancouver Fire Chief Dan Pistilli.
Crews cut power to the terminal and lugged hoses between four and five storeys up to the exhaust vent where the cooling fan ignited.
“It makes it a bit difficult to work in the pitch black and there was a fair amount of heat in the early stages but the crews worked extremely hard to get the thing knocked down,” Pistilli said.
Dousing the blaze took about half an hour but crews stayed on the scene checking for hotspots. Two firefighters were given oxygen on scene due to carbon monoxide exposure, Pistilli said.
The pellet plant is where the company takes material left over from screening the grain and processes it into animal feed.
The rest of the terminal was back up and running as of Thursday morning though the pellet plant — which is a small part of the overall operation — will be offline until the infrastructure can be repaired, according to Jean-Marc Ruest, Richardson International vice-president.
The fire didn’t pose a risk of a grain dust explosion like the one in 1975 that sent a shockwave through Moodyville and burning debris raining down on the community, both Pistilli and Ruest agreed.
“We’re always concerned whenever there’s a fire in a grain terminal. We’re always concerned about what could happen, but this was in an area that was physically separated from the main terminal so the risk of a catastrophe of that type was very remote,” Ruest said.
The company is planning to have its new expanded silos up and running by late-2015 or early-2016.
Pistilli said the fire department and Richardson have been working very closely through the design and construction phase to mitigate any potential fire risks.
