Fire Case History

This account was submitted by Greg Roberts, a master s degree student, who had worked for a department store chain. 

While safety manager, I received a call from Waldorf, Maryland, notifying me a store had been partially destroyed by fire. The details were at best sketchy, so I boarded our corporate plane immediately to survey the damage and report on the cause. 

The store was of a typical design with a 54,000-square-foot interior and an additional 5,000-square-foot garden shop attached outside. It met all building codes in Maryland for fire protection and was less than one year old. 

When I arrived, the store manager and the inspector in charge of the investigation met me. What we discovered was the fire began in the garden shop and spread via the cantilever roof to the inside structure. However, the fuel source was a surprise. 

As many large retailers do, the buying department purchases boxcar loads of merchandise. The merchandise is then segregated and shipped in large quantities to each store. During the summer months, the store stocked and sold a great deal of peat moss, cow manure, and 10-10-10 fertilizer. 

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This chapter describes the main features of vapor cloud explosions, flash fires, and BLEVEs. It identifies the similarities and differences among them. Effects described are supported by several case histories. Chapter 3 will present details of dispersion, deflagration, detonation, ignition, blast, and radiation. 

Refer to Appendix A, Case History 4, for an example cooling tower fire that resulted in over 2 million dollars damage (1997 dollars). 

Case History 3 Fire Turns into an Ecological Disaster... 

Stracher, G. B., Taylor, T. P. Prakash, A. 2002. Coal fires a synopsis of their origin, remote sensing detection and thermodynamics of sublimation. In Shannon, S. (ed) Environmental Technology for Mining Case Histories of Mine Reclamation and Regulation. Robertson Geo-Consultants Inc., Reno. Nevada, 1-8. (Available on-line at www.infomine.com/technology/... 

Although most explosive incidents have involved mixtures of the chlorate with combustible materials, the exothermic decomposition of the chlorate to chloride and oxygen can accelerate to explosion if a sufficient quantity and powerful enough heating are involved. A case history of a fire-heated explosion of a store of 80 t of chlorate is given. The more stable sodium chlorate will also explode under similar... 

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