This story originally appeared on GRIST and is part of the Climate office Collaboration.

Wood pastilles, by design, are strongly burnt down. Small pieces of wooded tablet tablets, such as sawdust, are used in everything, from home heating to grills. But their flammable nature has made dangerous working conditions: since 2010, at least 52 fires have broken out in installations that make wooden pellets in the United States, according to the database of incidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Of the 15 largest wood pellet installations, at least eight have had fires or explosions since 2014, to agree In the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit organization founded by a former director of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

At the same time, the largest biomass company in the world, Drax, reduces trees in North America with the promise to sell them to replace fossil fuels. But even its history is checkered with accidents.

In South Shields, in the United Kingdom, wooden lozenges intended for a drax plant Spontaneously burned In storage at the port of Tyne, triggering a fire that took 40 firefighters 12 hours to go out. In Port Allen, Louisiana, Drax Wood-Pellet Facility caught fire in November 2021.

Now, despite the discovery in the middle of a trial for accidental damages, Drax is displayed with a new commercial proposal; This not only involves cutting trees to make wooden pellets, but supports society, also to help stop forest fires.

In October 2023, after having bought two plots of land in California to build two pellet factories, one in the county of Tuolumne and another in the county of Lasen, the partner organization of Drax, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, “a non -profit company of manufacturing”, met residents of the Comté de Tuolumne Manufacturing process for the manufacture of wood players can mix the risk of Wildfire.

GSNR praised his close work with members of the community. However, according to Megan Fiske, who educates the rural world in a local community college, residents living near the proposed sites of Pellet Mill were not always aware of the plans. “People who were a hundred feet from the [proposed] Pellet Plant had no idea, “said Fiske.

The two proposed factories are found in forecast areas that have been threatened by forest fires. Asked about the risks according to which the manufacture of wood pellets, Patrick Blacklock, executive director of GSNR, told Griste: “We have sought to learn from these accidents. Design characteristics can greatly contribute to mitigating the risk of fire.”

If the county representatives approve of the plan, the loggers will be up to the height of taking “dead or dying trees” and “wooded biomass” within a radius of 100 miles of pellet factories in the two counties, which ride the national forest of Stanislaus and the Yosemite National Park.

Fiske said that she had seen cases, unrebeated in Drax, where the loggers were not formed properly and finished taking more wood than what should have been lightened in a program of resilience of forest fires. “There is a different beteween what the loggers are told and what is happy in the field,” said Fiske. You have “inexperienced or underpaid young people, maybe English is not their mother tongue, so there are many barriers”.