"roof collapsed and one of the 94 firefighters was buried..."

 

All aluminium plants should have a working relationship with their local fire departments. This relationship exists with many older plants. Many older plants have employees who volunteer with local fire departments, etc. Here is an incident on the emphasizes the hazard of fighting a fire in an aluminium plant.

During the combat one of the firefighters was buried under the falling roof. He was rescued in serious condition and is in a coma.

At around 2:30 pm one afternoon on the week of July 12, 2020 a call came in at 119 to answer a fire at an aluminum processing plant in a city in the Osaka Prefecture.

During the extinction activity, the roof collapsed and one of the 94 firefighters was buried. The victim, in his 40s, was rescued in serious condition and is in a coma. 

The fire spread and burned the 3 neighboring houses. The fire was contained in about 2 and a half hours. 

 

"When starting the heating to melt the aluminum in the oven, it caught fire," said the person in charge of the production line. Police and fire experts investigated the cause of the fire as it was reported that there was kerosene nearby at that time.

 

We pray that the injured fireman recovered from his injuries.

 

From any incident one can find many items that can be used as learning tools to make your individual plant and your company safer. If we assume that the kerosene that was “nearby” when the fire broke out at the furnace. The fire from the furnace could occur from a myriad of reasons including but not limited to fuel hose link, exhaust stack, molten metal spill, etc. It appears that the kerosene was the combustible or was one of the combustibles that ignited. From our experience we would make the assumption that molten metal came into contact with kerosene. With a flash point of kerosene between 37 and 65 °C (100 and 150 °F) molten metal contact would ignite that liquid.

 

A tour provided to the fire department would have benefited the aluminium company and local fire department in this incident in a myriad of ways. On a tour the fire personnel should be provided an updated diagram/blue print/map of the plant. All exits should be labeled, emergency shutoffs (eg., electricity, fuel (natural gas, propane, diesel, kerosene), water, etc. With that in hand the fire department personnel should be shown where each emergency shutoff value/switch is and how to operate them. Fire personnel should be instructed on how to extinguish fires involving a variety of combustibles present in your plant. NEVER MAKE THE ASSUMPTION that they know how to extinguish aluminium dust, shavings, cuttings, dross, etc. The Aluminium Plant Safety Blog have posted incident after incident where fire personnel died while trying to extinguish a fire in our industry. Their deaths are attributed to a lack of knowledge on how to properly extinguish a metal, dross, etc. fire. That is unacceptable, every fire department should be trained by our plants to eliminate this from occurring.

 

We will reach out to our contacts in Japan for further information on this incident. We will update this post when information comes forth.

 

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