Mill Fire Alert Ended

Peter McIntyre Monday, 12 July 2010 14:20 107.5 KISSFM:

Residents of five mobile home parks in the area near the Tolko sawmill south of Armstrong, have been allowed to return home, a day after being ordered out. An evacuation order for the 200 homes was downgraded to an alert, but all orders and alerts were recinded by the municipality as of 3pm. About 300 residents were ordered out Sunday afternoon due to smoke and fire danger after a sawdust and wood chip pile ignited at the mill. Armstrong deputy fire chief Alester Crick told a news conference, fire crews were able to contain the flames to a hog pile and log yard, although an old Tolko lunch room and D-8 tractor were destroyed. "The amazing work with Tolko getting the fuel out of the way has enabled us to declare the fire not being out but under control. The fire will be burning in the ground and in the hog fuel pile for quite a while but it will be a case of monitoring with local resources rather than using extensive outside resources."

Crick hasn't had time to officially investigate the cause but he suspects it was spontaneous combustion, something he says happenes at a lot of mills. "One of the problems with hog fuel, being kind of a wood product, is that it's out there in the open and in the elements. It gets wet and moist and starts breaking down with bacteria and you get smouldering fires developing into open fires." Tolko's site manager Pat Donnelly had no estimate of the loss but says the log damage won't cause further curtailments of production. "We have ongoing processes to monitor and for removing and dealing with the hog fuel.We work very hard to ensure this doesn't happen (but) fires do occur in hog piles."

RCMP Sgt Dave Evans says the highway was closed until early this morning due to the danger of the smoke and fire, causing major delays for motorists. "It was very lengthy and we did a lot of evaluating of that. We had a lot of concern about routing highway traffic onto Otter Lake Road, a narrow winding country road, but it was deemed unsafe for traffic to travel through the mill site area with the air attack, the fire crews and the limited visibility."