JEDDAH, 17 May — How to suppress a fire at the speed of business? The key to keeping lost time to a minimum is speed.
The faster you suppress a fire, the less resulting damage and disruption to your business. The pace of business is fast. You need a fire suppression strategy that is faster.
Many fire suppression systems can cause some kind of collateral damage to the very things they are supposed to protect, from precious artwork to sensitive electronics. Even if these items aren’t destroyed, this collateral damage often causes extensive delays for cleanup and repair that can lead to serious downtime and loss of business.
Today, however, international panels of scientists and government agencies have spent years studying the effects of various substances — including fire suppression agents — on our environment. The fact is the impact of an uncontrolled fire on the environment can be extremely serious. Fire grows at an exponential rate, pouring toxic smoke and combustion products into the air, with the potential to harm people, animals, crops and forests, and the atmosphere itself.
What can you do about it? You can choose a fire suppression system that works to extinguish fires as quickly as possible. And you can choose a fire suppression technology that is environmentally responsible.
Sometimes in all the talk about protecting equipment and data and facilities and the environment, one can lose sight of one’s greatest need: Protecting human life. What happens if a fire starts when there are people in the room? What happens to the people when a fire suppression system is deployed?
The need is for a system that will make breathing easy, explains Kenneth K. Blanchard, program manager-product advocate of US-based Great Lakes Fluorine Chemicals.
“A fire suppressant has to be an active agent that does not work by removing ambient room oxygen. It chemically and physically interrupts the fire,” said Blanchard, who gave a presentation, organized by Salem Agencies & Services Co. (SAS) at the Saudi Binladin Group headquarters in Jeddah on Wednesday. He said FM-200 (CF3 CHFCF3 heptafluoropropane) had an ozone depleting potential of zero and the shortest atmospheric lifetime among the Halon replacement gases. “This fire suppressant can be safety used where people are present.
It is perhaps the most widely tested and studied fire suppression agent available, and is backed by the most comprehensive database of toxicological data of any product of its kind; in fact the compound has been approved as a replacement for ozone-depleting propellants in pharmaceutical inhales, such as those used to dispense asthma medications.”
He added: “The fire suppressant was actually created in response to the need to find an effective new extinguishing agent to replace ozone-depleting fire suppressants such as Halon. Great Lakes’ lifetime management plan for this fire suppressant ensures our responsible stewardship from manufacturing through decommissioning. Today, in more than 70 countries across the globe, including nations with some of the world’s toughest standards for environmental protection, FM-200 systems are used to protect critical facilities and valuable assets.”
Perhaps most important, no other system can stop a fire faster. When you truly understand what’s at stake when a fire starts, you know that’s the most important environmental issue of all,” said Blanchard, who was accompanied by the US-based Kidde Fenwal’s John Robertson. Mukhtar A. Farid, head of fire protection department at SAS Systems Engineering, said all efforts were directed toward increasing the awareness of fire hazards. The concern areas, according to him, are data processing facilities, telecommunication, process control rooms, electrical switchgear rooms, high value medical facilities, industrial equipment areas, libraries, museums, art galleries, flammable liquid storage areas, hospitals universities high rise commercial buildings, hotels, oil and petrochemical industries, heavy elector-mechanical plants and most of all the protection of human lives.
The issue of utmost concern is of protection of sensitive areas from fire without depleting the stratospheric ozone layer. This is the main concern of the environmental protection authorities worldwide.
