Roseburg said Wednesday in a press release that its Weed mill produces electricity by burning wood remnants, and that the resulting hot ash is sprayed with water to cool it. “Roseburg is investigating whether the third-party machine failed to cool the ash sufficiently which thereby ignited the fire,”. The company is “working closely with state and local investigators to determine if this is the case,” the release said.
James Frantz, the lawyer representing the Hammond family in the lawsuit, expressed skepticism about Roseburg’s claim that another company’s equipment may have been responsible for the fire. Frantz, who has represented plaintiffs in fire-related lawsuits against PG&E and utility Southern California Edison, claimed Roseburg was using the third-party sprinkler maker as a “scapegoat.”
“We want to get firsthand knowledge about what knew about the safety or dangerousness of storing that ash,” Frantz said Thursday afternoon. Speaking for Roseburg, Pete Hillan, a partner in San Francisco crisis-PR firm Singer Associates, said it was too early for the company to respond directly to the allegations in the lawsuit. Roseburg’s suspicion that a failure of the sprinkler system may have caused the fire is based on the blaze burning two buildings at the mill, one of which had “active ash” inside it in a cement bunker.
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