A fire broke out a Royal Oak charcoal plant located in Huntsville, Arkansas on Sunday. Fires are an unfortunate hazard with charcoal manufacturing, and thankfully, nobody was injured at the plant.

Firefighters from Huntsville worked with the Smyrna and Witter Aurora fire departments to battle the blaze. They successfully extinguished it, which isn’t always the case with charcoal plant fires. Given that charcoal is designed to burn, often charcoal plant fires are just contained.

Modern equipment helped with battling the blaze. According to a Facebook post from the Huntsville Fire Department, a Ram master stream device was able to remove the smoldering product to prevent spread. They also used thermal imaging from a drone to asses the fire from a safe distance.

According to air permits received for the facility, eight Missouri-type, concrete kilns and a lump charcoal packaging plant are located there. Each kiln can produce 23 tons of charcoal in a 7-day batch cycle.

Missouri Type kilns are used to produce charcoal through the process of pyrolysis. The kilns are loaded with wood, sealed and then subjected to slow burning by supplying only minimum combustion air to the kiln. The combustion air supply is controlled by a series of air injection ports located at the base of the kiln. This results in a reducing atmosphere which drives off the volatile compounds in the wood and produces charcoal.

Waste wood, also called slab wood, is purchased from saw mills and is used as the raw material to produce the charcoal. The complete kiln “firing cycle” (loading, firing, cool down, and unloading) takes approximately seven days. Almost all of the emissions occur over a four day period in the middle of the cycle.

The wood slabs are loaded into a kiln. It takes five tons of wood to yield one tone of charcoal. The kilns will be started on a staggered schedule. Only four of the eight kilns on the oxidizer will be in the maximum burn phase at any given time. In a 7-day batch cycle, approximately one day is allotted for loading/unloading and approximately on day is allotted for cooling. The burn phase lasts about five days.

Air Permit No. : 0892-AR-3

The extent of the damage to the facility is unknown. I reached out to Royal Oak for comment and haven’t heard back yet.