The fire occured in one of two low-plume cooling towers and seemed to be confined to the cowlings of about three cells. They're relatively lightweight GRP which will burn bright and smokey so it looked dramatic on camera. There's a half-decent photograph in this link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fir...

My inital reaction was "How the heck have they set that on fire??". I expect it will be proven to be electrical in origin because the tower will have a decent-size motor driving a fan in each cell, and wooden cooling towers aren't exactly easy to set on fire because of the amount of water in the immediate environment. It needed a lot of energy to get it going, and the fan supplies are the only large sources of ignition energy on the tower.

I imagine that they will get part of the tower back in service with the remaining cells fairly quickly. At this time of year when the ambient temperature is fairly low they should be able to make most of their rated output even with part of the tower damaged.

No one reported hurt, and they can rebuild the rest of it.

Thanks Scotty,
The initial press reports seem to suggest that the fire had taken out one cooling tower rather than two cells of one tower. As you suggest it seems it will be possible to re-route some piping to return the unit to service.

Looking at photos it does not seem that the boilers have bypass stack so no possibility of open cycle operation.

Thanks again,
athomas236