The Gray Monk

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December 14, 2005

Congratulations to the Fire Fighters!

The Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service deserves some plaudits - as do the many services who have contributed personnel, appliances, foam stocks and equipment to dealing with this blaze. These fires are never easy to deal with, sometimes you get lucky and can extinguish it quickly without getting other tanks, pipes and bunds involved, but not always. There is the ever present risk of further leaks, vapour ignitions or explosions - and there is an element of uncertainty about the contents of some tanks, how full they are or what the actual behaviour of the contents is likely to be.

In the Buncefield incident, I would suspect that almost all of the required fixed protection systems which the service would normally be able to use to assist in fighting the fire, will have been damaged or destroyed in the initial blast. That, in itself, makes fighting the fire a great deal more difficult since it means that personnel will have to be exposed to the heat and flames - and the risk of vapour ignition behind them as they advance - in order to put the necessary equipment in place to tackle it.

On this occassion, the service has had to take a step by step approach to fighting this fire, first setting up a containment system to ensure that nothing else joined the fun and that what was already on fire, didn't go anywhere else! While that is going on there is a need to assemble all the foam concentrate supplies needed for the attack and to ensure that all the equipment that will be needed is on site and can be deployed to where it will be effective. Once all that is in position, the attack an commence. You cannot start the attack until you have sufficient foam concentrate on site to ensure that once you start to pour foam you will be able to continue pouring until the last flame is dead. Any interuption can result in a "burn back" where the foam already applied is burned off and the fire jumps back to the start point.

In effect this means that, in order to successfully attack a fire like this you need a water supply that will not dry up or lose continuity and you need the quantities of foam which will enable a seamless pouring operation to commence, before any attempt is made to fight the fire itself. To put this in perspective, the water usage since the atack started has been 32,000 litres per minute. Put another way the fire fighters have thrown 32 tonnes of water a minute at the fire. To that must be added 2,000 litres of foam concentrate per minute (2 tonnes per minute) which must be fed into the water streams so the foam cannon and handlines can "pour" foam onto the surface of the burning oil.

One thing which has helped the fire fighting here is that the tanks do not seem - from the photographs - to have collapsed and so the fires are, at the present moment, still contained in the damaged tanks and are thus separated. This has allowed the service to attack along a perimeter and extinguish one area at a time successfully. Had any tank collapsed it's contents could have been released into a bund, threatening the collapse of any adjoining tanks by increasing the burning surface and thus the heat output from the fire.

Even so, the service has achieved a major success on this and deserve the congratulations of everyone for their achievement. Perhaps too, that fat toad who has, with his equally culpable civil service poodles, now leave well alone and stop the further reduction and destruction of a service whose members have performed this feat. Somehow I suspect only a fire of this magnitude in the heart of Whitehall will actually get the real recognition the service deserves from the denizens of Prescott's little empire at the ODPM.

Posted by The Gray Monk at December 14, 2005 10:06 AM

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Posted by: The Scarlet Manuka at December 15, 2005 04:07 PM