Re: Alcohol as a gas

Posted by Matt from CT on July 19, 2008 at 08:26:02 from (68.244.108.167):

In Reply to: Re: Alcohol as a gas posted by Goose on July 19, 2008 at 08:03:49:

Whoever wrote the article was clueless.

It's very rare to use traditional Class B (flammable liquid) foams on automotive fires. <-- note period.

The amount of water carried and the rate it can be applied will remove the heat and extinguish the fire. So you have a 30 gallon tank of E85. An engine showing up with 500 to 1000 gallons of water and applying it at 150 gallons per minute or better will put out the fire and dilute the E85 quite nicely.

I'm fairly confident most municipal departments, if they do buy Class B foam with it with the initials "ATC" or "AR" tacked on -- Alcohol Type Concentrate or Alcohol Resistant. Connecticut's 7 foam trailers carry 600 gallons of AFFF-AR that can be applied at 1% for petroleum only products, or 3% for polar solvents like alcohol.

AFFF stands for Aqueos Film Forming Foam. You will rarely see the right situation to take advantage of the Film Forming properties in a municipal fire service. On large, flat area like an airport tarmac or the top of a bulk storage tank it's the cat's meow.

In municipal situations normally too many things stick up and penetrate the fuel, and the topography of ditches and banks and all, interfere significantly with the ability to use the film to your advantage. So you need to fall back to making a mechanical foam blanket to cut off the oxygen from the fuel if you're gonna use foam. And for the amount of fuel in a passenger car or even the saddle tanks of tractor trailer unit...it just doesn't matter what the foam is. Class B, Class B alcohol resitant, or simply Class A (wood) foam will make that blanket.

Frankly, Class A is cheaper and more municipal departments can use it today, and works well to speed up the knock down on small Class B fires like from an automobile.

If you have a 9,000 gallon tanker of E85 or Gasoline roll over...you won't have municipal resources to do anything but watch it burn for a while. It would take hundreds of gallons of Class B foam concentrate to effect the extinguishment, and very few municipalities make that kind of investment in either foam or the equipment to apply it at a sufficient rate.

There are a number of Fire Department concerns with modern cars that didn't exist or where uncommon 20 years ago -- air bag locations, air bag inflators (can't just cut the columns anymore -- have to make sure there's no side impact curtain inflators there first, for instance). Electrics and hybrids with high voltage cables to be concerned about. CNG powered vehicles.

E85 is NOT a concern.

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