The analyzes carried out after the explosion followed by a fire on Wednesday in a factory classified Seveso "low threshold" of the company Saipol in Sète (Hérault) "allow at this stage to rule out any risk of pollution", he said. The CGT on Wednesday accused its parent company, the Avril group, led by the president of the FNSEA Arnaud Rousseau, of not “learning from the tragedies of the past” Two people had perished in Dieppe, where two people had died in 2018, and in Grand-Couronne, near Rouen, in 2020.
The fire broke out around 5 p.m. in the “esterification” warehouse (editor’s note: manufacturing of fuel from seeds), while the company was shut down and in a maintenance situation. It had could have been extinguished in the evening, but a thick black plume rose from the factory for several hours, pushed towards the sea by the wind.