On the day one Prince George sawmill started rebuilding after a fire, another Prince George lumber company sounded the fire alarms.
Carrier Lumber, located at 13700 Willow Cale Forest Service Road southeast of the city, had an explosion at their planer mill. Several volunteer fire departments responded to the call.
"It was an explosion within the planer blower pipe," said Carrier Lumber president Bill Kordyban. "It transports dry shavings down a 30-inch pipe away from the planer and into a cyclone in a small, separate building off to the side called the blower building, and that's where the explosion happened. The building is clean so there was no secondary explosion, it was a primary explosion contained within the pipe and that's all there was to the chain of events in this incident."
There was a smoldering fire as well, but Kordyban said that was from a previous incident.
The system had been shut down to extinguish the small fire within the planer equipment. These are common and minor in nature. Firefighters from the Buckhorn Volunteer Fire Department were on scene in April for one such small blaze.
At that time BVFD chief Richard Hersey said "we have been called to the mill before for things like this," but praised the Carrier Lumber staff for their fire safety record.
In this case, said Kordyban, the fire seems to have not been extinguished and when the
production system was restarted, it led to the explosion within the large pipe.
Prince George RCMP attended the Monday incident. The alarm was called at about 4:15 p.m., said Const. Kristopher Martin, but "there is no reason to believe this explosion is suspicious" and the case was closed within an hour.
As a precautionary measure, BVFD also called in reinforcements from Pineview, Red Rock and Ferndale-Tabor VFDs.
Also as a precaution, Kordyban said, one person from the mill was medically examined, suffering from minor injuries.
It was not lost on Kordyban that Monday was the day of the ceremonial ground-breaking at the Lakeland Mills site. That mill is being rebuilt after a devastating explosion and fire destroyed the Lakeland operation in April, 2012, only three months after a similar fatal blast destroyed Babine Forest Products in Burns Lake.
"Of course we are all very sensitive to this issue. We are thankful that this seems to be a different set of circumstances," Kordyban said.
