Evacuation at Northwood Pulpmill
Friday, May 25, 2012 @ 8:50 PM
Prince George, B.C.- A tube leak in a recovery boiler at Canfor’s Northwood Pulpmill this evening caused the evacuation of 60 employees from the mill.
General Manager Robert Dufresne says the leak was discovered around 6:30 this evening, and normal procedure called for the boiler to be drained. “It was felt to be prudent to evacuate the mill during that process.” All workers were back on the job by 8:30 this evening.
Dufresne says the cause of the leak is not known, “We will have to wait until the unit cools down before we can pin point the cause, and that will likely be tomorrow before we can get a close look at it.”
He says while the full shift is expected to report to work tomorrow, about half will likely be doing maintenance work .
Dufresne says the recovery boiler could be down for a couple of days to allow time to identify the problem and make the necessary repairs.
Comments
P.G. Pulpmill also had to evacuate the steam plant last week because their recovery boiler also had a leak and they had to rapid drain the boiler.
This is what happens when Bean Counters take over running the mills.Catastrophic Maintenance is when things get a bandaid fixing and you hope there was no collateral damage. ie injuries or death.
Scary business, having decisions for critical maintenance on pressure vessels in the hands of bean counters. Is pressure applied to supervisory personel to make decisions between ( very expensive )replacement of questionable tubes and whether or not they will hold until the next shut, based on the NDT report?
Would the tubes have been routinely replaced during the last shut down in more prosperous times?
Steam vessels can be incredibly dangerous when things go wrong.
metalman.
A chemical recovery boiler is more dangerous than your average “steam vessel” due to possibility of smelt water explosion.
So what industrial operations in this area run chemical recovery boilers 2cents?
metalman.
Recovery boilers are found in pulp mills using the kraft process such as PG Pulp,Intercon and Northwood which has two.
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