Fires at mills and wood finishing plants can take a terrible human and financial toll. Such fires can easily cause widespread property damage and destruction, and worse, injuries and loss of life. Such fires often spread beyond the physical plant and affect the community surrounding it.

These types of devastating tragedies make plain the risks of “hot work” in wood processing and manufacturing plants, especially where heating, welding, cutting or soldering are common.

That devastating tragedy made plain the risks of “hot work” in wood processing and manufacturing plants, especially where heating, welding, cutting or soldering are common. Hot work procedures in non-residential buildings account for more than half of an estimated 4,580 hot work-related structural fires annually.1

Developing a program for hot work procedures

Insurers typically provide hot work permits with a bulleted list of mandatory safety steps on one side and a form on the back to be completed with information on each hot work project.

These are detailed permits, listing the date of work, where and when work was conducted and the areas that were inspected. A permit must be posted in every area designated for hot work and collected and kept on file for each project.

Hot work permits will document that safety procedures are followed. An insurer will decline coverage to at-risk operations like lumber mills that lack a documented hot works program. Inspections are conducted to check for risks; cancellation or non-renewal may be the price for not addressing them.

Key hot work procedures and safety requirements

When fires do occur, it’s typically because safety procedures haven’t been followed. Top precautions include the following:

  1. Daily cleaning. Accumulated materials like wood chips become more combustible. Plants must meet cleaning standards, and employees need to know their specific roles in meeting those requirements.
  1. Protect the work area. Remove combustible materials and liquids from any work area and seal floor and wall openings within a 35-feet (10.7-meter) radius. Ducts, conveyors, floors and wall openings that could carry sparks should be protected.
  1. Watch out for sparks. Trained “spark watchers” equipped with fire extinguishers should be on every job to spot and manage stray sparks. They also should monitor the area for an hour after work has stopped. While many operations may not want to take someone off production to watch sparks, doing so is essential to fire mitigation.
  1. Fire sprinkler system should be in service. Any wood processing or manufacturing operation needs a sprinkler system; these systems need to be checked and rechecked for functionality. As in the case of the California fire, when sprinklers malfunction, the result can be disastrous.
  1. Take advanced precautions. While the number of wood mills lacking sprinkler systems is vanishingly few, there are some plants that have spaces that sprinkler systems cannot reach. Hot work needs to be avoided in such areas. It’s also important that plant personnel hose down floors and cover combustible materials in any area with hot work.

Contact a HUB forestry and wood products expert to learn more about mitigating the risks of hot work in wood production.

1 ASK-EHS, “Dealing with hot work processes in industrial scenarios,” July 27, 2022.