In 20 years of baking career I had come across numerous fire incidents in bakery plants . Few were severe others were of smaller nature . These fire incidents raises doubt about the safety standards in the factory . Plant management has to convince people that things will not be repeated to erase fear from minds of workers .The damage caused and the production loss are heavy in such incidents . It takes numerous months to get the insurance claims from insurance companies . Any casualty in these incidents would have resulted in closure of plants , hence every precaution should be take to prevent or eliminate these fire incidents.
Plant were
Biscuit Plant
Fire in Ovens
Fire in bopp laminate waste in scrap yards
Bread Plant
Fire in ovens
You can see that majority of fire have taken in baking area ie is oven area , its natural that most risky place in the bakery production process is oven area with fuel like hsd , ldo , gas and rfo , even electric ovens are now being used in bakery process .
Following has contributed to fire in these cases
Biscuit
The hose pipe in burner came out from burner and fell on the hot plate of the burner zone thus inciting fire
Scrap yard caught fire as some one threw butt of cigarettes in that area .
Bread
In all the incidents , accumulation of bread,crumbs ,debris and remnant inside the the oven mostly in swing tray type oven has contributed for these fire incident .
Following precautions could have reduced and helped people to react to fire hazard in bakery .
- Get a insurance cover for accidents , fires for the factory
- Cleaning of oven periodically definitely would help .
- Have Emergency lights in different area
- Check all manual drives to take out things from oven
- Have Emergency number written in major production area
- Have mock drills in regular interval
- Check all fire safety equipments by third party
- Do the fire extinguishers refilling after the expired dates
- Designate some technical person as safety officer to concentrate on safety issues
- Get the NOC license from local bodies
- Training of workers for equipment used in process also helps in reduction of fire hazards
- Give safety ppe to workers in hot areas
- Use HOT working cards for jobs inside the
- Get fire hydrant installed for long term solution
- Have atleast UPS to drive the material out of ovens.
- Storage of Fuel and Gas to adhere to legal specification of the authorities .
- Install Fire extinguishers in plant
- Fire Hydrant Hose Pipes in several locations
- Install smoke and heat detectors in fire prone area .
Its only when such incident happens that the factory management looks into safety aspect . Simple lapses from factory management could result in heavy loss to the company.
1 Insurance Policy copy
2. Claim form
3. Fire brigade report
4. Police FIR
5. Witness statement ( any two ) first hand acct
6. Cause of accident in detail
7. Pics of the fire incident
8. List of damaged items
9. Log sheet of production report
10. Stock statement of the plant
11. Detail calculation of the loss
12 Raw mat cost supported by purchase invoices
13 Costing of WIP and FG
14. Destruction certificates for the burnt material
15 Balance sheet
16. Material to be kept till insurance company approves the damage and loss of material
So its better to have fire safety in place and avoid fire hazards in bakeries