October 29th, 2003, at about 8:30 p.m., aluminium dust in the scrap reprocessing area caused an explosion and fire in the Hays Lemmerz International plant in Huntington, Indiana. USA. One of the operators nearby lost his life and two others were critically burned. Three more employees and one contractor escaped with minor injuries.
The Hayes plant in Indiana manufacturers cast aluminium alloy wheels and has been operating since 1984, employing around 300 people. The chip processing system was in operation since 1995 up to 2003, scrap aluminium was fed into a chip mill, then centrifuged to separate the cutting oil from the wet chips, which were fed into a hopper, dried in a kiln dryer, fed into a dry chip hopper and cycloned into a melt furnace. The dust vent was extracting dust from the cyclone.
At 2:30 pm on the day of the explosion, the chip feed system was shut down due to a smoldering fire inside a duct of the fume hood of furnace five to the fume separator. Fires were a common occurrence for the Hayes staff, hence it did not alarm the operators and the process was resumed after two hours of the fire burning out.
At about 8:30 pm, ten minutes after resuming the system, operators noticed chips falling out of the spark box in the dust collector duct. This was shortly followed by a fireball escaping from beneath the fume hood and igniting the operators clothing. The fireball travelled upwards and blew open the roof of the building, where a contractor was testing emissions of the neighboring furnace.
Another contractor was working in a mobile laboratory trailer, near the dust collector drop box. A portion of the drop box was lodged against the back door of his trailer making it difficult to escape. A small amount of combustible materials stored behind the kiln was ignited along with the roof and insulation. The emergency services got to the facility within ten minutes of the explosion and the fire was contained and extinguished in only about two hours.
The explosion resulted in one fatality and two operators in critical condition and three additional employees, and one contractor received minor injuries. The affected area of the plant acquired major damage, as the dust collector system and the roof were completely blown apart. The plant resumed production a week after the explosion, however the dry chip processing system was dismantled, and the wet chips were sent to be processed off site.
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