Things That Go Bump in The Night
DEPARTMENTS
EDITOR S NOTEBOOK
Sometimes I wonder how fire fighters ever get to sleep, considering the multitude of dangerous situations that can develop -always without warning – during the night and in the light of the next day.
Surprise and risk are the constant companions of fire fighters.
Surprise is not a strong factor in offices, schools, homes and industrial environments. Systems there are at work to make everything predictable and controllable by police or habit. But it can never be so simple for the fire fighter. For example, consider the variety of challenges faced by fire fighters in this issue alone.
Volunteers in Maryland fought 14 separate house fires along a 1 1/2-mile path after gasoline was accidentally dumped into a sewer system. And in Newark, N.J. 150,000 gallons of gasoline overflowed a storage tank and Ignited explosively. That’s just two aspects of a single hazardous material in a world of thousands of dangerous substances.
Fire fighters often have lists of buildings already identified as potential trouble spots. If one of them doesn’t burn on any given night, then exposure to a mobile hazard passing through is always a possibility. In Denver a rail tanker with nitric acid was ruptured.
Fumes from the spilled acid forced a major evacuation. Admirable resourcefulness was shown in using a snowblower to throw a neutralizing substance on the acid. Nitric acid, by the way, is the 11th most common hazardous material in terms of manufactured volume. That means there is a lot of the stuff around somewhere.
In Phoenix the problem was with a truck carrying liquid hydrogen that expands 21,000 times just to its lower flammable limit. That’s the kind of expansion ratio that gives BLEVE a bad reputation. Good work by fire fighters extinguished the fire with minimum damage.
Now, let’s see . . . fire fighters in Hawaii had to contend with multiple fires set by the advancing lava from a volvano. In jersey City, N.)., the water system went out. Imagine, a densely populated (200,000) older city suddenly with no water. Meanwhile, though not covered in this issue, fire fighters in other parts of the country were recovering from flood conditions.
There’s more, but you already know the score. Of course, some of these incidents happen only once in a lifetime, but the point is that each night, each day, in any town, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN!
A major disappointment of mine is that the public doesn’t fully appreciate that burden on fire fighters. Of this last fact I want to say, “It’s not fair.” But that doesn’t change anything. I do believe, however, that an organized public information program to help keep taxpayers and neighbors aware of the contributions of fire fighters would be a worthwhile activity. Or it could keep them awake at night, thinking about the multitude of dangerous situations that can develop.
