Preamble 'A small fire which started in a plastic scrap at a warehouse near Sanauri Adda, Patiala on night of October 31st quickly became a major accident. Plastic scrap acted as a readymade fuel for the fire. Though, no one was hurt in the incident, a major tragedy was averted due to presence of mind and immediate action from local fire services. It took as many as 23 fire tenders around 11 hours to control the blaze.' A news like this is increasingly finding place in the everyday newspaper. As India is witnessing rapid industrial growth with newer industrial hubs flourishing day by day, the need for fire protection is also increasing significantly. Many of the industries are moving towards larger factories, bigger warehouses and larger confined areas for critical application. High expansion foam systems definitely answers to these constraints and requirement making it one of key system whose time has arrived to make Indian industry safer. With improvement in India's rank in ease of doing business, new and more industrial hubs are being built and flourishing with increased FDI having favourable environment for industries. With this new trend in industrialization, there is a considerable increase in investment in industries and sectors such as Petrochemical, Chemical, Pharma, Automobile, Aviation, Oil & Gas, and Warehouses etc. As per latest data from GOI's national investment promotion and facilitation 42
agency, India is the 5th largest market in terms of aircraft passengers (domestic and international), we are 3rd largest biotech destination in the Asia Pacific Region having 9 Biotech parks, we are 6th in the world in Chemicals sales and contributes 3% to global chemical industry, we are 2nd largest refiner in Asia having 4.56% CAGR for Gas consumption, we are 3rd largest pharmaceuticals industry in the world by volume and 4th largest vehicle market having 40% share in global R&D. With this there is significant increase in chemical and petrochemical warehouses, aircraft hangers and LNG consumption, automobile manufacturing etc. there are the industries which has large number of critical application and processes including confined areas for machineries, storage of materials and products, process areas etc. Critical industrial applications and process areas are largely confined structures and size of which varies as per process requirement. These are termed critical as they handle the vital process part of any industrial processing and may contain high value machineries, materials, products or process areas etc. Whenever a fire breaks out in any such critical confined area, we depend primarily on a firefighting system that detects & deploys quickly, is effective and safe for personnel. Generally and majorly it includes initial water sprinkler/spray systems that immediately detects the fire on occurrence and deploys the water application quickly. However the purpose of these primary systems is limited to their immediate activation and to contain the further fire spread till any emergency personnel are deployed at site to January 2022 - www.visionmediahitech.com
