Engineers’ clothes set alight by fireball

Two engineers were set on fire by an electrical explosion as they tried to seal off a faulty fuse box at a factory in Cumbria.
 
Carlisle Crown Court heard that, on 12 September 2006, a small electrical fire in a fuse box at global package firm Innovia Films Ltd’s factory in Wigton. Workers put out the flames with a fire extinguisher and then re-routed the power supply so that the cooling equipment, which is used to maintain product quality, could continue to operate.
 
The following day, engineer Gordon Metcalf, 62, and an apprentice, who does not wish to be named, were asked to plate over the fuse box to prevent it from being accessed until it had been properly inspected. They were removing debris from the box when a fireball shot out of the circuit board, setting their clothes on fire. They ran into an adjacent room where colleagues used a fire hose to put out the flames.
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