A firetruck heads toward the Sapa facility Monday afternoon in response to a fire in one of the company’s painting lines. Rob Nielsen/P&D
Posted: Tuesday, August 4, 2015 10:43 pm
By Rob Nielsen rob.nielsen@yankton.net
Sapa Extrusions officials are saying a fire that forced a 3 ½-hour evacuation of their Yankton operation Monday afternoon will not have a major impact on operations.
Plant manager Kevin Perakslis told the Press & Dakotan said he doesn’t have a cost estimate on damage, but that the fire was contained to a small area.
"We have two paint lines," Perakslis said. "The fire only involved one paint line, and in that paint line, there’s two paint booths and all the fire was contained to one of the paint booths, which we’re very happy about. … From our first assessment, some of the individuals who have helped have worked through paint line fires before and they’re amazed at how limited the destruction was."
Yankton deputy fire chief Larry Nickles told the Press & Dakotan a paint gun is the suspected cause of Monday’s fire.
"Right now, we’re looking at the possibility of static electricity while a paint gun was being flushed out with solvent," Nickles said.
Perakslis said, after employees were let back in Monday evening, elements of the Sapa plant were incrementally brought back online throughout the night. Everything except for the damaged paint line was up and running normally by Tuesday morning.
Perakslis said the fire will not have any significant impacts on output.
"We have a self-paint line which is our newer, high-performance paint line," he said. "One hundred percent of our customers are painted on that paint line — that’s the one that’s undamaged. The north paint line, we were only running it a few days a week when we had enough customer demand and we had the manpower. It’s not one we plan on running every day. It shouldn’t be a major impact on our customers at all."
He added that repairs aren’t expected to take very long.
"We are still checking the structural damage on the roof and it looks like we might need to do some repairs," he said. "But it’s all minimal. We can possibly have the paint line repaired and up by the end of this week."
During the fire, large quantities of firefighting equipment ended up coming into contact with some of the paint used by Sapa.
Nickles said while some pieces are able to be cleaned and salvaged, others will need to be discarded.
"The thing we were fearing was our airpacks that are about $6,500 a piece," he said. "Turns out we were able to salvage everything on those. We did lose about 10 sets of turnout gear (protective clothing) and gloves and about 400 feet of hose."
He added that the paint is a safety issue on these pieces of equipment.
"Typically, a little bit of paint doesn’t hurt anything, but in this case this paint does not dry until it’s been baked at 350 degrees for an unspecified amount of time," he said. "If we would try to clean it with a solvent, the problem is it reduces the flashover resistance of that gear. Our gear is about 1,350 degrees where it accepts a flashover for up to 60 seconds. Anytime you’ve got grease and oils and paints into the material, it reduces that temperature rating."
Estimated equipment losses are around $20,000.
Perakslis said he was grateful that the situation didn’t end up being any worse than it was.
"No one was hurt," he said. "Our employees were evacuated quickly. The fire department was here very quickly, so I want to thank the Yankton and Gayville fire departments. They came in and got it resolved as quickly as they could which allowed us to get back in the plant quickly and clean up. I was very happy with how the plant reacted. Everything was done safely. No one from the fire department was hurt, no one from Sapa Yankton was hurt so we’re very happy about that."