Accidental Foam Suppression Activation in Aricraft Hanger

You know you are having a bad day when…

http://www.news9.com/story/26372082/tulsas-army-national-guard-base-covered-in-fire-suppression-foam

Hahahahahah the birdies got. A bath!

That happens sometimes. I remember testing one of the hangers at Logan International Airport once and we had an electrical contractor come and shut down the foam system while we tested the flame detectors. Dumping all that foam is pretty expensive, and it can be dangerous. Some of that high expansion foam is designed to smother the oxygen out of a fire, so wading through it when its over your head could be a death sentence.

The system at Logan has had accidental activations before, mostly from airport employees having BBQs too close to the hanger. :roll:

It happens, I’ve heard more than a few stories of foam being dumped in hangers. One involved a stealth bomber with the cockpit open. Oops. :shock:

One of our tech’s recently dumped a CO2 system… by his own fault (inexperience with suppression, he didn’t pull the solenoids). We also had a tech disable 2000lbs of FM200 gas, but didn’t know about a smaller 80lb tank hidden away under some stairs and he dumped it in a pharma lab ruining a batch of whatever meds they were making. That one was costly.

Ouch… :roll:

I would love to hear the back story on what happened here! My guess would be someone didn’t close the isolation valve before they started testing. Yeah, stupid things can happen like the BBQ setting off a smoke detector and dump a system but there were trained professionals on site. First thing you do on a foam system is shut off the valve for the foam tank. If the system dumps, at least you are not dumping the foam - maybe a little bit of water. Maybe something happened at the end of the test and a solenoid tripped after opening the valve for the foam tank - but you just kind of wonder if someone wasn’t rushing or acting like a big shot!

But with Simplex and their “50% Annual Inspections”, shouldn’t they just dumped half of the foam anyway???

The bigger question is whose idea was it to put an hidden tank under the stairs, lol

Is it a pilot tank that’s designed to provide pneumatic power for the 2000 lbs tank array’s valves? Or does it belong to another set of system?