The wooden pellet mills are subject to focus. Why build them in California?

The wooden, design pellets are highly flammable. Small pieces of compressive woods, as a sawdust, are used in everything from domestic grilled heating. But their flammable nature has made dangerous working conditions: since 2010, at least 52 fires broke out in the structures that produce wooden pellets in the United States, according to a database of accidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Of the 15 largest wooden pellet structures, at least eight have had fires or explosions since 2014, second To the environmental integrity project, a non -profit organization founded by a former director of the United States environmental protection agency.

At the same time, the largest biomass company in the world, Drax, is reducing trees throughout North America with the promise to sell them to replace fossil fuels. But also his track record is chess with accidents.

A South Shields, United Kingdom, wooden pellets intended for a Drax plant spontaneously baptized While in storage in the port of Tyne, to start a fire that took 40 firefighters 12 hours to extinct. In Port Allen, in Louisiana, a structure for Drax wood pellets broke out in flames in November 2021.

Now, although he found himself in the middle of a cause for accidental damage, Drax is pushing with a new commercial proposal; It implies not only reducing trees to create wooden pellets, but, supports the company, also to help stop fires.

In October 2023, after purchasing two landmark in California to build two pellet mills, one in the county of Tuolumne and another in the county of Lassen, the partner organization of Drax, the natural resources of the golden state or the GSNR, a company of non -profit public benefits “.

Since then GSNR has advertised his close work with the members of the community. However, according to Metan Fiske, who instructing rural workers in a college of the local community, the residents who live near the sites offered to pellets were not always aware of the plans. “People who were one hundred meters away from [proposed] The pellet plant had no idea, “said Fiske.

Both proposed mills are in wooded areas that have been threatened by fires. When asked about the risks that the production of wooden pellets, Patrick Blacklock, executive director of GSNR, told Grist: “We tried to learn from those accidents. The characteristics of the design can do a lot to mitigate the risk of fire”.

If the representatives of the county approve the plan, the logger will be authorized to take “dead or dying trees” and “woody biomass” by a ray of 100 miles from pellet mills inside the two counties, which overlap the national forest of Stanislaus and the Yosemite National Park.

Fiske said he saw cases, not related to Drax, where the logger were not correctly trained and ended up taking more wood than he should have been authorized based on a resilience scheme for fires. “There is a difference between what is said to the logger and what is happening on the ground,” said Fiske. You have “inexperienced or underpaid young people, perhaps English is not their first language, so there are many barriers”.