Chemical Safety Board (U.S.) has uploaded a free 56min video on BP Texas Fire and Explosion case. Titled Anatomy of a Disaster: Explosion at BP Texas City Refinery, the video is valuable to all safety and health professionals, especially those involved in oil and gas industry. Click here for the video.
Posts Tagged ‘fire’
Free BP Texas Fire & Explosion Accident Video
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008Oxygen enriched environment
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008Oxygen is necessary for human beings to breathe, but it pose a hazard if it is in excess of its usual component in the environment (21%). Oxygen is not easily detected by our senses and when there are leaks in oxygen hoses in an environment, especially a confined space, the space can become oxygen enriched easily. Once an environment is oxygen enriched, any open fire or spark can cause a violent fire to occur. The fire burns intensely and hair and clothing burn easily causing severe burn injury.
Click here for an information sheet on oxygen enriched environment.
Fire classifications
Monday, March 10th, 2008Wikipedia has an article on fire extinguisher (click here). However, they did not describe the fire classifications for different countries. In Australia, based on AS 2444-2001 Portable fire extinguishers and fire blankets – selection and location, the fire classifications are below:
- Class A – fires involving carbonaceous solids
- Class B – fires involving flammable and combustible liquids
- Class C – fires involving flammable gases
- Class D – fires involving combustible metals
- Class E – fires involving energized electrical equipment
- Class F – fires involving cooking oil and fats
Note that these are fire classifications and not fire extinguisher classifications.
Fire tetrahedron versus fire triangle
Friday, March 7th, 2008Fire tetrahedron is now replacing fire triangle as the basic model to understand the essential ingredients of a fire. It’s no longer a new concept, but there are still a lot of people ignorant of fire tetrahedron. Essentially on top of the fire triangle, another key component is actually the ‘chemical chain reaction’. More specifically, the chain reaction involves the production of hydroxl (OH) radicals. These radicals last only in the order of 1 ms (Brauer 2006 ISBN 0-471-29189-7).
The fourth component means that even if all the components of the fire triangle are not easily removed it is still possible to suppress a fire by preventing the continuation of the chemical chain reaction. There are a lot of proprietary additives to fire fighting equipment meant to stop the chain reaction. See Chow et al. (2002) for some introduction on this.
See this website for basic information on fire triangle and the fire tetrahedron.