Fire at Silicon Smelters
A furnace transformer caught fire due to a suspected electric arc.
A fire took place at Silicon eMalahleni Smelter on May 19 at 21:00.
Emergency services only managed to extinguish the fire at 03:45 the next morning. Langamed Witbank was the first helping hand that Silicon Smelters received on the scene, but they could not put out the blaze alone and as a result, they immediately called the local eMalahleni fire brigade to come and assist. Later, the Middelburg fire brigade was also requested to assist with a foam unit.
No injuries were sustained and only structural damage occurred. “We are fortunate to always have a spare transformer available for our furnaces to keep the plant from long stoppages from a similar event as we have an important responsibility towards our customers. From our side we truly cannot complain of the assistance we’ve received from the various Emergency Services and thank all of them for their cooperation,” said Mr Nellis Bester the Managing Director of Silicon Smelters.
Mr Bester said that they frequently inspect their transformers with assistance from specialists in the field that come to their plants. All transformers at Silicon are very recent and basically new, which brought confusion to Mr Bester as to how the incident could have happened. He describes the event as an abnormal failure. “We lost production time and obviously the incident will be costly to us, but at zero harm to our customers. I am unable to predict the future, but as a company, we can only hope that nothing like this occurs very soon again,” concluded Mr Bester.
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