Re: $$ up in smoke

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 03:36:54 GMT, "FMB" <fmbb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Ron Recer" <ron48@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:59ksncF2llba7U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Friday lightening started a fire in a refinery tank holding 2 million
gallons of gasoline. Before that was brought under control an adjacent
tank containing 1 million gallons of diesel caught fire. They can't put
the fires out, but have kept them from spreading and both fires are
expected to burn themselves out in the next few days. If you are
traveling on I-35 near Wynnewood, OK and see smoke to the east it is the
refinery fire.

Ron

I can't think of any reason beyond 'irresponsibility' to let them burn out.
There are just too many good companies out there that would put them out.
(Boots & Coots and Williams Fire are a couple) So many ways, so much foam,
large nozzles, LDH and pumps... oh well...

Ahh, the luxury of sideline quarterbacking.... I think that people who
actually KNOW what they're doing can think of a few reasons to let it
burn.

From my days on the fire brigade and local civil defense chief living
in an area around a large tank farm and as an instrument engineer
who's spent quite a bit of time around tank farms,

The least bad of the options is to let the stuff burn out. If it is
extinguished, in the case of gasoline, one has to deal with
thousands/millions of gallons of hot boiling gasoline making vapors
that hug the ground. Foam does nothing against that. Reignition and
a fuel-air-explosion is almost assured.

Diesel is almost as bad. Again foam does little to nothing to
suppress the boiling diesel vapor and diesel vapors are even heavier
than gasoline.

In either case, if the fire was extinguished and reignition somehow
miraculously avoided, consider what remains. Thousand/millions of
now-worthless highly flammable fuel contaminated with
water/foam/dirt/fire debris. Disposing of the mess would be a
monumental task. It is very unlikely that a pipeline company would
allow that mess in their pipelines as-is so it would have to be
trucked 8000 gallons at a time back to the refinery or else a
filtration plant set up on-site to clean it enough to go in the
pipeline.

Once back at the refinery, what to do with it? Refineries aren't set
up to reprocess end product. Maybe build some sort of
filtration/reprocessing line (at what cost?) so that it could be
blended into some low grade fuel like bunker oil.

No, the only economically viable and practical solution is to let the
stuff burn up. When the fire's out all there is to clean up is some
burned metal and a few thousand pounds of tar and sludge. The farm
operators have insurance that will pay for the lost stock (most
likely.) and the clean up and if not, well there's always the casualty
loss on the tax return.

Those deluge water cannons you see around tank farms are NOT there to
put out tank fires. They're there to keep OTHER tanks cool while the
burning one does its thing.

John
---
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.neon-john.com
Cleveland, Occupied TN
All great things are simple and many can be expressed in single words:
Freedom, Justice, Honor, Duty, Mercy, Hope. -Churchill
.

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