New York TWA Flight 800 Fuel Tank Vapour Air Explosion 1996 and Other Fire Cases - Case Study Example

FIRE CASE STUDIES 1. New York TWA Flight 800 Fuel Tank Vapour Air Explosion 1996 On 17 July 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, experienced a catastrophic in-flight break-up and explosion while flying off the coast of Long Island, New York. The cause of the accident was an explosion of the centre wing fuel tank, resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel-air mixture in the tank. The source of the blast could not be establish with confidence but assessment of other sources reveals that the most probable origin was a short circuit in fuel quantity indicator near the wing fuel tank. There were no survivors – 230 people on board were killed (Krause 2003, p.399). 2. One Meridian Plaza Fire - 23 February 1991 At approximately 8:40 p.m. of 23 February 1991, the Philadephia Fire Department received a report of a fire on twentieth floor of the thirty-eight story Meridian Bank Building, commonly known as One Meridian Plaza. The blaze burned for more than nineteen hours. The fire caused three fire-fighter fatalities and injuries to twenty-four fire fighters. The twelve alarms brought fifty-one engine companies, fifteen ladder, companies, eleven specialized units, and over three hundred fire fighters to the scene.. It consumed eight floors of the building and was controlled only when it reaches a floor protected by automatic sprinklers. The fire was caused by spontaneous ignition of improperly stored linseed-soaked rages that were being used to restore and clean. Eighteen and one-half hours later, the Philadelphia City Fire Department declared it under control on the 30th floor – the first floor above the fire floor that had an automatic sprinkler system. According to the NFPA, the following significant factors affected the outcome of the fire. The lack of automatic sprinklers on the floor of fire origin. The effectiveness of automatic sprinklers on the 30th floor, which, supplied by fire department pumpers, and halted the fire’s vertical spread. The lack of early detection of the incipient fire by automatic means and inadequate pressures for fire hoses because settings of pressure-reducing valves were too low for the specific application in this building. The inappropriate storage and management of harmful, materials, producing both the initial ignition and rapid early fire growth. The early loss of the building’s main electrical service and emergency power (Craighead p.315). 3. Bradford Soccer Stadium – 11 May, 1985 At approximately 3:40 pm on Saturday, May 11, 1985, 56 people died and more than 300 were injured, many severely, as a result of a rapidly spreading fire at outdoor soccer stadium in Bradford, England, a medium-sized industrial city 171 miles north of London. The fire occurred in the main grandstand, which may have been occupied by as many as 5000 people. The portion of the grandstand in which the fire began consisted of wood bleacher seats and flooring and lightweight wood materials. A double-peaked combustible wood roof consisting of felt insulation and various layers of tar over wood members covered the entire 290 by 55 ft. grandstand. Based on the NFPA study of the fire, the following factors contributed significantly to the fire spread and subsequent loss of life. Ignition of accumulated trash below the wood bleachers and the initial fuel supply provided by the trash and lightweight wood bleacher materials. Combustibility of the wood bleachers and roof structure and the influence of the structure on fire spread once the flames reached the roof deck. Failure of patrons to perceive the danger of the developing fire in the early stages and begin evacuation. Once direction occupant flow design of aisles and exists and lack of sufficient number of open and available exits (Cote 2003, p.2). 4. King’s Cross Underground Station Fire- 18 November, 1987 The King’s Cross underground station is one of the three busiest of London’s complex underground railway systems, with fire separate subway lines served on three different levels. At approximately 7:30 p.m. on November 18, 1987, a fire occurred just as rush hour was tapering off. The incident began when a small fire was reported on one of the three escalators between the ticket concourse and the station immediately below. At 7:45 p.m., the fire erupted up into the ticket concourse, creating severe conditions likened to that of a flashover, with thick black smoke emerging from the station entrances at the street level. The fire burned for several hours. Thirty-one people died, including a London Fire Brigade officer, and more than fifty people were injured, several with severe burns. Most fatalities were located around the perimeter of the ticket concourse (Cote p.4). At the inquiry, one woman recalled entering the station with other people at about 7:40 p.m.; she noticed that, as she was proceeding out of the station, people were moving in the opposite direction to her. Before leaving the building, she noticed thick black smoke behind her, yet there were still people moving towards the fire (Thomson 2002, p.91). A discarded match or cigarette end set fire to grease and rubbish on the Piccadilly line ascending escalator running track at King’s Cross-station. Running tracks were not regularly cleaned because of ambiguous responsibilities. Smoke detectors were not installed on cost grounds and water fog equipment was infrequently used due to rust problems (Glendon 2006, et. al. p.121). The tragedy was aggravated by the lack of an evacuation plan, escape routes being blocked by locked doors and metal barriers, outdated communication equipment, no access to station public address system by headquarters controller, non-functioning of camera and TV monitors, lack of public address system on trains, and absence of public telephones at the station (Glendon et. al. 2006, p.121). The fire attains flashover in just minutes and smouldered for more than 5 hours (Carvel and Beard 2005, p.25) 5. Falklands Hospital Fire – 1984 On April 11, 1984, fire wrecked Falkland Islands’ lone hospital killing seven patients and a nurse who stayed in the burning building rather than leave her charges. Report says that the 50 bed King Edward Memorial Hospital had been in need of urgent repair and that some fire hoses and pumps did not function. The fire started in part of the old wing of the hospital, which was a wooden structure built in 1914. The cause at the time of the report was not established. However, the question of hospital services on the island has been the subject of consideration on a number of occasions since late 1982. This has included a study of reports, which referred to fire hazards and precautions in the hospital buildings. 6. Woolworths Store in Manchester -1979 On 8 May 1979, a fire broke out at a Woolworths store in Manchester. Ten people died and forty-one others were hospitalised including six firefighters. A damaged electrical cable ignited the furniture stacked at the furnishing department in the second floor. The rapid spread of the fire was due to the highly-inflammable and toxic polyurethane foam in the furnishings. Another reason was the absence of fire preventing measures like a sprinkler system to stop the spread of the fire. As a result, the second floor was totally consumed by fire while the third floor was severely damaged by smoke. Moreover, all floors suffered large water damage during fire fighting operation. The Home Office enquiry into the accident considered that the tragedy could have been avoided if Manchester City Council had applied the building byelaws more vigorously by requiring compartment walls or sprinkler systems when the building was extensively altered some 12 years previously (Geraghty and Whitehead 2004, p.280). 7. World Trade Centre – 2001 It was warm and clear Tuesday of September 11, 2001 at around 8:46 a huge plane hit between the 93rd and 99th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. Debris and office documents fell from the massive opening along parts of the plane and other debris. Seventeen minute later, at 9:03 a.m., another airplane crashed into the tower. Majority of the sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand people inside the twin tower were not aware that planes had collided into their building. They are knew that they need to leave the building because their offices were filled with smoke. All 256 people onboard those planes died and another 2, 595 people died at the World Trade Centre. Three hundred forty-three New York fire fighters and sixty police officers perished. (Englar 2006, p.8). 8. Kader Industrial Toy Factory, Bangkok, Thailand. 10/5/1993 On May 10, 1993, a major fire at the Kader Industrial Co. Ltd. Factory located in the Nakhon Pathom Provice of Thailand killed 188 workers and 469 injured. The fire started late on a Monday afternoon on the ground floor in the first building and spread rapidly upward, jumping to two adjoining buildings, all three of which swiftly collapsed. The structures had been cheaply built without concrete reinforcement, so steel girders and stairway crumpled easily in the heat. Main doors were locked and many windows barred to prevent pilfering by employees. Flammable raw materials such fabric, stuffing, animal fibers were stacked everywhere, on walkways and next to electrical boxes. No safety drills nor fire alarms and sprinkler systems had been provided. Hundreds of workers had been trapped on upper floors of the burning building, forced to jump from third or fourth floor windows. This disaster is considered the worst accidental loss-of-life in an industrial building of modern times (Stellman 1998, p.39). The actual tool was undoubtedly higher since the four-story buildings had collapsed swiftly in intense heat and many bodies were incinerated (Croteau et. al. 2005, p.276). The toys were being produced for export and most of those who died were young women. An investigation revealed that many of the factory’s fire escapes were blocked or locked and that safety laws had been widely breached (Rigg 1997, p.228). 9. Dublin Stardust Disco -1981 The tragic fire at the Stardust disco on 14 February 1981 claimed 47 lives. The flames under the ceiling produced a rapid heat transfer on the furniture below that led to spontaneous ignition in a few seconds (Callanan 2003, p.262). One of the main problems was the sheer numbers of people in the disco at the time. This is combined with a total lack of any form of Building Regulations, inadequate local authority supervision and the untrained owner’s advisers, contributed to the disaster. The management failed to give the alarm and commence evacuation immediately the fire was noticed. Instead, the occupants watched the unsuccessful attempts of two employees to extinguish the fire. Then without warning, it became an inferno, the fire spreading exceptionally rapidly due to poor seating, wall lining materials and low ceilings (Stollar and Abrahams 1999, p.52). 10. Düsseldorf Airport Fire The fire in Düsseldorf airport on April 11, 1996 burned for approximately more than six and half hours killed 17 people. Another 62 people were taken to the hospital for severe injuries. All the victims had only smoke inhalation. More than 2000 responders arrived with 215 apparatus, and 701 personnel, with 265 police. The fire began at approximately 3:31 p.m., approximately the same time somebody noticed flashing lights from the ceiling in the area of a flower shop at the east end of the arrival lobby on the first floor. At 3:58 p.m., fire build up occurred throughout a large area of the first level of the terminal, and Düsseldorf Fire Brigade was called. Two engines, a ladder, a water tanker, and a command officer responded to the scene at 4:07 p.m. The fire started when sparks coming from a welder working above the lower level of the airport, ignited the polystyrene insulation used in the void above the ceiling on the first level. The area where the fire occurred was not equipped with any automatic sprinkler systems and dry standpipes were located in the stairwells on the curbside of the terminal building but were connected to a municipal water supply. There was no smoke detection in the void since it reportedly was not used as a return air plenum. 11. Manchester Airtours - 1985 British Air Tours Flight KT328, on 22 August 1985, prepared to takeoff from Manchester, England. The plane carried 131 passengers and a crew of 6. After the aircraft travelled a third of the way down the runway, reaching a speed of 120 miles per hour, the left engine exploded, rupturing some nearby fuel tanks and fuel lines, spewing jet fuel into the rear passenger section. When this fuel ignited, it created an inferno followed by a load explosion. The pilot immediately shut down both engines and applied the brakes. Within a minute fire-fighting engines reached the scene and started to pump foam over the burning airplane. Passengers choked by smoke billowing from aft section started the pandemonium. Two explosions further aggravated the chaos, created by people trying madly to exit the plane and the presence of fire, as oxygen tanks blew up. In the final analysis, there were eighty-three survivors, including four cabin attendants and the captain; seventy-eight received medical attention (Haine 2000, p.58). 12. Channel Tunnel – 1996 On Monday 18 November 1996, at around 22:00 hours, a fire occurred on heavy goods vehicle shuttle 7539 on the French side of the Channel Tunnel. There were no fatalities but passengers and crew were treated for smoke inhalation. One-half of the Tunnel was out of service for about six months (Carvel and Beard 2005, p.42). The train left at 21:42 hours entering the Running Tunnel South at a speed of 57 km. per hour and as the train entered the Tunnel two security guards at the portal noticed a fire beneath one of the HGVs and reported this to the French Control Centre. Almost immediately a fire alarm sounded within the driver’s cab indicating that there was a fire in the rear locomotive. Because of the fire, tunnel telephone network failed and all communications were restricted to the concession radio, which quickly became overloaded. The fire severely damaged 10 shuttle wagons, HGVs, and a locomotive. In addition, it severely damaged the tunnel structure and ancillary equipment over a length of 2 kilometres of the tunnel (Whittingham 2004, p.247). 13. Great Fire of London – 1666 The fire began early in the morning of 2 September 1666. The fire broke out at a baker’s shop near London Bridge and spread and burned for three days. At this time, most houses in London were built of wood and pitch construction. There was an immense cloud of smoke and there was a great tower of fire mounting up into the sky, which light whole country landscape for ten miles around. Showers of host ashes rose into the air and flying sparks carried the conflagration to great distance. Church steeples fell down with tremendous crashes, houses crumbled into cinders. The citizen fire fighting brigades had little success in containing the fire with their buckets of water from the river. By eight o’clock in the morning, the fire had spread halfway across London Bridge. Although the loss of life was minimal, some sources say only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was staggering. Some 430 acres or as much 80 percent of the city proper was destroyed including 13,000 houses, 89 churches, and 52 Guild Halls (Harris 1990, p.80). 14. Windsor Castle Fire -1992 At around midday on Friday 20th November 1992 Berkshire Fire Brigade received a call to a fire in the Queen’s private chapel in Windsor Castle. Upon their arrival, they found a significant fire developing in the Brunswick Tower, a part of the building dating from medieval times. The fire was started in the chapel from a tungsten lamp, which came into contact with curtains screening the altar. Because of the timber and voids, the fire travel between rooms and corridors with some ease taking full advantage of the timber fuel it found as it progressed. The fire destroyed 105 rooms of which nine were principal staterooms. The heat and the water from fire extinguishing efforts caused irreparable damage. Many floors had collapsed and others were on the point of collapsing. The cost of repairing the damage was estimated at £60 million and the drying out time before applying finishes at 10 years. The water trapped inside the structure was a major problem, as the remedial work had to wait for the moisture contents to drop to acceptable levels (Ive 2006, p.9). 15. Fire in a Warehouse near Stratford on Avon, Warwickshire, November 2007 At around 6 p.m. of November 2, 2007, a Friday, Warwickshire Fire Department received an emergency call that a warehouse is on fire. The respond arrive at the seen and saw flames from a vegetable packing plant at Atherstone on Stour near Stratford upon Avon. Eighty fire fighters and 16 fire engines from Warwickshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and the West Midlands services confronted the blaze. While the fire fighters controlling the blaze, the raging flames caused the shocking collapse of a large section of the roofs. The blazed was extinguished the next day after 12 hours of burning. One fire fighter died and another three missing as a result of the huge blaze. Arson is the suspected cause of the fire according the police (Fire Fighter Close Calls 2003, p.1). 16. Hickson & Welch Limited, Castleford, Yorkshire, 1992 In 1992, an explosion occurred in a distillation vessel associated with mononitrotoluene plant at this works. The vessel had never been clean since its installation in the early 1960s and consequently contained a 14” deep residue of jelly-like sludge. This sludge contained flammable dinitrotoluene and nitrocresols covering one of the unit’s steam heating coils. Plant manager decided to remove the sludge with a metal rake after passing steam through the coil to soften it. However, during the raking, with the heating still on, the sludge ignited, sending a jet of flame over 50m long shooting through the plant control building in the site’s main office block. Five people died because of this and the company was fined £250,000 with £150,000 costs for failing to ensure the safety of its employees and putting them at risk of fire. The U.K. Health and Safety Executive’s report on the incident blames inadequate monitoring, safety and operating procedures and lax plant design for the explosion (Heaton 1996, p. 16). 17. Concorde Aircraft Crash, Paris. 24th July 2000 In 24 July 2000, Air France’s Concorde aircraft crashed. The plane caught fire on takeoff and the pilot lost control. The plane smashed into a small wooden hotel, demolishing it. One hundred thirteen people died in the crash, four were on the ground. The cause of the crash was claimed to be a metal strip, inadvertently left on the runway by another aircraft, which ripped a tire and caused the fuel tank in the wing to be punctuated by tire debris. The fuel caught fire, the engine power was reduced, and the plane crashed (Clarke 2006, p.136). 18. Bhopal – India 1984 On 3 December 1984, there was a leak of methyl isocynate from a storage tank in the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal, India, and the vapour spread beyond the plant boundary to a shantytown, which had grown up around the plant. Over 2000 people were killed and some 200,000 required medical attention. According to the official report, the material in the tank had become contaminated with water and chloroform, causing a runaway reaction. On December 2, 1984, the second shift production supervisor ordered the MIC plant personnel to flush out the pipe work with water, which have found its way to one of the tank. The pressure inside the tank rose and an operator heard it rumbling and felt heat radiating from it. An attempt was made to start the refrigeration system but failed due to lack of coolant. The toxic gas alarm was sounded to warn the local community but the siren caused confusion among the people living in the neighbourhood and fled into the direction of the toxic cloud (Kletz 2006, p.62). 19. Seveso – Italy 1976 The use of unnecessarily hot heating medium led to the runaway reaction at the Seveso, Italy in 1976, which caused a fallout of dioxin over the surrounding countryside, making it unfit for habitation. In a chemical plant manufacturing pesticides and herbicides, a dense vapour cloud containing dioxin, a poisonous and carcinogenic by-product of an uncontrolled exothermic reaction was released for a chemical reactor used for the production of trichlorophenol. Although no immediate fatalities were reported, large quantities of dioxin were widely dispersed, resulting in immediate contamination of an area of some ten square kilometres. Hundreds of people had to be evacuated from their homes for months and thousands were treated for dioxin poisoning. In the aftermath, a number of abortions of human foetuses occurred, that appeared to be attributable to the event, and thousands of animal deaths were reported (Briggs et. al. 2002, p.176). 20. Piper Alpha Platform Fire 1988 On 6 July 1988, the Pipe Alpha offshore oil and gas platform in the North Sea, standing in water around 75 meters deep about 100 km off the coast of Scotland, caught fire. The fire destroyed the platform, killing 167 people out of 226 workforces. At around 10 p.m., there was a gas explosion that killed two people and damaged some of the fire fighting water mains and the electrical supply system to parts of the processing section. The gas explosion caused damage to the firewalls around the condensate module and started leaks in the heavy oil module alongside that led to a large oil fire. The fire weakened the main gas pipeline, which came up from the seafloor through the centre of the processing module or in the middle of the oil fire. A gas pipeline ruptured and the resulting fireball enveloped the platform. All men that had been instructed to go to await rescue perished and only those who decide to jump 175 feet into the sea survived. As the resulting fire spread, most of the Piper Alpha workforce made their way to the accommodation where they expected someone would be in charge and would lead them to safety but they were disappointed as the whole system of command had broken down. The Offshore Installation Manager failed to organize and take critical decisions and lead those under his command in a time of extreme stress (Tweeddale 2003, p.412). Bibliography: Briggs David J., Forer Pip, Jarup Lars, and Stern Richard. 2002. GIS for Emergency Preparedness and Health Risk Reduction: proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on GIS for Emergency Preparedness and Health Risk Reduction, Budapest, Hungary, 22-25 April 2001. Springer, Netherlands Burke Robert.2007. Fire Protection: Systems and Response. CRC Press, U.S. Callanan Mark and Keogan Justin. 2003. Local Government in Ireland: Inside Out. Institute of Public Administration, 2003, Ireland Carvel, Richard and Beard Alan. 2005. 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Gulf Professional Publishing, U.S. Whittingham Robert. 2004. The Blame Machine: Why Human Error Causes Accidents. Butterworth-Heinemann, U.K. Read More