MOSCOW (MRC) -- An investigation has begun into the cause of a fire that killed one person and left another with life-threatening injuries at a Toronto chemical plant on Wednesday morning, reported CBC News.
Emergency crews were called to the plant near Beth Nealson Drive and Wicksteed Avenue in the Thorncliffe Park area just after 9:50 a.m. Toronto police originally said they were called to attend to an explosion, but Toronto Fire later clarified that the incident was a chemical fire.
"Toronto Fire Service has extinguished the fire," said Acting Fire Chief Jim Jessop at a news conference on Wednesday. "As of right now there is no risk to the public ... we are now just making sure the chemicals involved in this process have been stabilized."
Officials said the incident was caused by a chemical spill, but Jessop would not confirm which specific chemicals were involved.
"Without question our crews were met with a significant chemical fire that took us a while to extinguish," he said.
Fire officials said the incident occurred at a site of specialty chemicals firm Siltech Corp in eastern Toronto. The plant has been evacuated and the roads and railway are closed in the area.
Police also said the fire has been classified as an industrial accident, which will be investigated by the Ministry of Labour.
As MRC wrote previously, a major incident occurred at Irving Oil’s Saint John refinery in New Brunswick in early October, 2018. Residents in the area reported an explosion and fire at the refinery. Irving Oil Corp shut its Saint John refinery in the Canadian province of New Brunswick after an explosion and a major fire that followed. The company operates the 320,000 barrel-per-day refinery at this site.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,176,860 tonnes in the first half of 2021, up by 5% year on year. Shipments of exclusively low density polyethylene (LDPE) decreased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 727,160 tonnes in the first six months of 2021, up by 31% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased. Supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC