A massive fire broke out at Vedanta Electro Steel Plant at Siyaljori in Bokaro, early morning on Sunday. Following the incident, power generation from the unit has been stopped. No injuries or loss of life was reported in the incident.

“We were working in the morning shift and suddenly, at about 9 am, a transformer of the power generation unit caught fire,” said an eyewitness.

The fire was controlled after several hours of efforts of the fire brigade, which led to huge losses. “Right now it is quite difficult to assess the actual loss but it may be assumed in lakhs,” said the eyewitness.

Meanwhile, Vedanta-Electrosteel official said that there was a minor fire incident in one of the generators of the Power Plant, which is situated inside the integrated steel plant.

“There have been no injuries or loss of human life,” said a PR official.

“Prompt actions were taken by our fire safety team which helped control the fire quickly, causing the least effect to plant as well as machinery,” he added.

All the other units are operational and the power plant has been normalised, said the official.

The Vedanta-Electrosteel unit at Siyaljori in Bokaro is 1.5 million tonne steel plant, designed and built by the Chinese steel major Laiwu Steel Group Limited (LSGL) based on Blast Furnace (BF)-Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF)-Billet Caster and Hot Rolling Route and will produce 1.2 MTPA of long steel products, comprising 0.5 MTPA of 5.5-12.0 mm diameter wire rods in coil form and 0.7 MTPA of reinforcement bars in straight lengths and bundled in the range of 8-32 mm and plain rounds up to 60 mm diameter.

Vedanta took complete control of debt-ridden Electro Steel Plant (ESL) in June last year. Now, Vedanta is on move to increase the production capacity of the present ESL unit from 1.5 MT to 2.5 MT for which company will invest 300 million US dollars, an official source said.