Agreed that woman or man operated equipment has many advantages in this scenario over fixed system, becuase it is commerical application, not industrial. The fail-safes are tried and accepted.
Some meaningful manually operated systems: 1. sand. yes buckets of sand work grand. 2. extinguishers (dry chem will put out a 3-D fire, but best in conjunction with foam 3. CAF (yes, it involves pressurized air, but that is about it for the complexities (open two valves and you got CAF). The benefits of a CAF system far outweigh the problem of carrying around a container with 3000 psig of air. There are backpack units which provide ample ammo against a typical motor vehicle refueling fire. With expansion rations from 7 upto 20 to 1, a backpack unit of 3 gallons (25 lbs) is light enough for most to carry, will extinguish a pool fire of gasoline that is 20 ft in diameter. What is better, you can stand 30 ft back, whereas standard Mr. Dry Chemical extinguisher or sand, you need to show up in the front row ( < than 10 ft or so). CAFS is sticky, so it works better than other agents in windy ways. Because of CAFS more robust bubble structure, one need not use fluorinated foams... in fact, in a pinch, liquid dishwashing soap will work, though you will probably not hear that from listed foam manufacturers. Quality CAFS extinguishers cost 10-50x that of a "normal" extinguisher, but they work. The risk of getting burned is orders of magnitude higher for using "industry standard" extinguishers than for CAFS, 4. foam deluge system from canopy is overkill, but if you were to design one, because of wind and blockage factors, just dump a 0.2 rather than 0.16 gpm/ft2. You might as well put the fire out if you are going to spend all that money. As Ron Greenman said, these are common in industry over gantries, where oscillating monitors *are still used.* Just because one talks loudly, does not make their arguments pretty or simply rationale. In fact, statistically speaking (which leaves all kinds of room for exceptions) it has been shown that on average, hedge-hogs (the personality type that talks loud and is adamantly sure of their prediction), are slightly worse than the fox-style personaliity type (uncertain, 2nd-guessing, nuanced, etc.) at accurately guessing what the true risk of a forecast will be.[1] Having said that about forecasting risks, there is the other side of the equation which is not often debated, but need be. Hedge-hog and fox-like mentalities each bring their own experiences and internal values to a risk assessment. Even if we agree on what the risk is, we don't often enter into debate over what the risk acceptance should be. It is uncomfortable, if not uncommon, for many an AHJ to simply talk openly about accepting an explicit chance for a fire fataliity. There is a cost-and-benefit to most decisions; we need to have more of these discussions, from both the determination and acceeptance directions. [1]. Tetlock, Philip, Menand, Louis, "*Everybody's an Expert", *New Yorker, Dec 5, 2005 Scot Deal Excelsior Fire/Risk Engineering gms: +420 722 141 478 _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/listinfo.cgi/sprinklerforum-firesprinkler.org
