- It was an extensive fire that was important to investigate so that more people can learn from the incident, says Ulf Bergholm, accident investigator at MSB (Authorities for civil protection and emergency preparedness).

At the end of August 2020, Polarbröd's factory in Älvsbyn was completely destroyed by a large fire.

MSB has investigated the fire in Polarbröd's factory in Älvsbyn in order to be able to map the course of the fire and the design of the fire protection.

- There are many contributing reasons why the fire could spread from a small ember fire to a total damage to the building, says Ulf Bergholm, accident investigator at MSB.

The causes of the fire point by point

The accident investigation shows, among other things:

  • The bakery has been built in stages for many years and this eventually led to the premises being a single large fire cell of 9,000 square meters.

    According to current building legislation, fire sections larger than 5,000 square meters must have sprinklers.

    It was missing in this case.

  • The investigation shows the importance of looking at the entire building in the event of changes and following the technical development around various technical fire protection solutions.

  • It has become clear in the investigation how important it is with technical systems that can detect even small fires at an early stage and extinguish them at an early stage.

    It is especially needed in hard-to-reach spaces that contain combustible material.

    Here, the installation of automatic extinguishing systems is a measure that ensures that a fire can be extinguished automatically without the staff having to risk anything.

  • The fire was caused by combustible material igniting in an oven, something that has also happened before, but then the staff discovered the fire early and were able to extinguish it.

    The bakery lacked technical solutions that could have detected and extinguished the burning material before it came out of the oven.

    This time the small fire with the conveyor belts continued in the different parts of the bakery.