“Overall, a positive outcome to what was potentially a very serious situation.....”

Fires can be difficult to put out in our manufacturing plants. Our facilities are typically large in size with complex machinery that which result in difficult access for firefighters. Here is a story that illustrates the difficulty that firefighters commonly deal with when entering our facilities:

A fire that broke out during the week of September 22, 2013 at Vulcan Inc in the Southeast United States was put out by firefighters without any injuries, according to local Fire Chief.

Fire crews responded to a fire in the production area of Vulcan, one of the city's largest employers that specializes in manufacturing aluminum signs and sheet metal as well as metal stamping.

"They had an active fire when we were notified," Darby said. "We were able to go inside and extinguish the fire. Fortunately, we had no injuries to their personnel; they were all able to evacuate and there were no injuries to our personnel."

"Overall, a positive outcome to what was potentially a very serious situation."

Two local fire companies were called in to assist, and to cover the rest of the town in case other emergencies arose.

The fire chief said it was a complicated situation due to the location of the fire.

"It was not a big fire per se but any fire in a manufacturing facility or industrial facility is dangerous,"he said "It's complicated because of equipment access so it takes a good bit of time to find it and then obviously you've got a lot of hazards in there as well."

The fire was contained quickly, fire chief said, and it took crews about 30 minutes to completely extinguish it.

As of 10 AM, fire chief said he was unaware of any chemicals involved in the fire that was in an aluminum casting area on the foundry side of the plant.

"They will have to investigate and find exactly what happened," Fire Chief said.

Less than two hours after the fire broke out power was restored to the entire facility that includes five manufacturing buildings, some of which were up and running again.

"They're obviously a major part of our community," Fire Chief said of Vulcan Inc, which has about 275 employees. "I hope they can get back up and running pretty quickly."

The management of this facility needs to be congratulated on a successful evacuation when the fire broke out. No doubt that this facility has had routine evacuation drills. 

The Occupational Safety Health & Administration has useful information on evacuation plans. Which can be viewed here.  

EMS personnel should be given plant tours once a year. The more familiarity that ems departments have with the layout of our facilities the quicker they can respond to emergencies. 

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