Safety Fire Suppression, Part II By Donald Burr PLC Safety & Training Coordinator safety@maineloggers.com
Last quarter we talked about the four firefighting tools that every piece of equipment should have on board. This quarter we are going to discuss how each tool works. To put out the fire you need to break the chemical reaction by taking out one of the three legs of the fire triangle. A fire needs three items to burn: Oxygen (air). Heat (sometimes not as hot as you think). Fuel (debris, oil, diesel fuel, & plastics). The two legs that are easiest to remove are oxygen & heat. It is tough to remove fuel once the fire has started because our equipment is full of fuels. When you are using a firefighting agent, you need to keep in mind that you need to meet the fire load of what is burning. Look at it this way, you build a small campfire, and just after you get it burning well, you decide to put it out. You have two options; a gallon jug of water with a wide mouth opening, and a gallon of water in a hand pump sprayer like you might use to clean with. Both have the same amount of water, but the speed of delivering the water is entirely different. The water jug can be dumped in seconds, and the hand sprayer could take twenty times longer. Now, in my scenario, it seems simple, you are going to pick the jug of water. You can draw a graph that shows the amount of extinguishing agent you need to put the fire out in all fires. Knowing that the first two minutes of the fire, the load could be a hundredth of what the fire load is five minutes later. Trust me. If you do not meet this level, you will never put the fire out until it naturally runs out of fuel. I have been on the scene of too many fires where we could not get enough water on the fire to put it out, and we were chasing it until it ran out of fuel. This is
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what the fire suppression systems installed in our machines are designed to do. Meet the fire load early and with force! Our little shock & awe. After the system has done what it can, you can finish the job with the dry chemical and loaded stream. Let’s go into what to do if you have a fire in your
machine. As you know, as an operator, things can go wrong quickly. If you think you have a fire, do the following as
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