Ethanol Plant Lost? Ethanol Plant Regained

So here's the latest on the Ethanol Plant Fire.

I also read about it in our local newspaper (I would've just linked to the story in the newspaper website, but their site is crappy and the link is broken). I guess this is the third fire since the plant opened a year and a half ago. In our paper, the fire chief said that they arrived at 2:00, and the fire was already very large, so the plant officials probably didn't call right when the fire started. There were actually two fires. The first one took four hours to battle. After they finished with that, they sent some scouts into the dryer building-place-thing to check out everything and found another fire that was even bigger inside.

Apparently there are fire doors that are programmed to close if the temperature inside an area gets to a certain degree, but the firemen opened those to check everything out and gave the fire inside a new supply of oxygen. I guess there were men on the roof (I think it's like seven stories up) and they had to quickly get them down when they discovered the second fire. So the firefighters battled the second fire well into the next morning.

There were firefighters from eight different departments, and three or four firefighters had to be treated for exhaustion.

There was supposed to be a meeting between the fire marshall chief and the plant officials last Thursday, but I don't know if our newspaper will do a follow-up on the story. One of the theories about how the fire started is that the corn just spontaneously combusted from the dry, hot environment in the drying areas. One worker said he's seen the corn smolder many times, but they've never had a fire as large or as serious as this one.

So I'll keep a lookout for more info. Hopefully the plant won't explode or anything.