Safety Talks: Firefighting Awareness

Basic Firefighting information is essential, many people specially homemaker females due to their lack of knowledge can’t extinguish even a small home fire and eventually become victim of fire situation. Knowledge about fire extinguishers is significant regardless of your profession and age so that you can save your life and lives of others in event of fire emergency. In this blog we are going to discuss some quick tips on fire extinguisher use, it is going to include the types of fire extinguishers, method of use, when to use and where to use.

 

Firefighters fighting with a large scale fire 

Remember, right of selection fire extinguisher on right kind of fire is essential because wrong selection can be harmful and lead into the trouble rather than controlling fire so without further delay let's jump right into it, to know about how to fight fires you first have to understand that fire is combination of three elements knows as fuel, oxygen and heat when combined called as fire triangle.

 

The fire extinguishers are designed in accordance to the international standards e.g. British, European and American standards however here we will focus on US standard NFPA 10: Standard for portable fire extinguishers. Fire Extinguishers mostly used as water, foam, carbon di oxide, ABC dry powder and wet chemical extinguishers whereas on some places such as pantries, welding and wood workshops, chemical storage and processing zones fire blanket also advisable. As explained above using the wrong type of extinguisher can actually just make a fire dangerous, let’s assume an example of the burning oil and just imagine fire being extinguished with a water extinguisher now the oil is naturally going to float on top of the water and the water will just encourage the fire to spread so you have to know the type or classification of the fire that need to be extinguished, fire can start due to many possible causes such as poor housekeeping, electrical short circuit, smoking, arson, accidental, from cooking, heating of appliances and even from young fire setters. The three ways of killing a fire are cooling, smothering and starvation that breaks the chain reaction and stop a fire from burning, these three methods when one of them is used they cut off a burning source from the fire triangle such as fuel oxygen or heat any one of them is actually cut off from the triangle so that fire can be extinguished.

 

     Author delivering a Fire Training Session at UAE Civil Defense Academy 

Now let’s talk about the fire classification in accordance to the NFPA, when we talk about class A fires such as fires generated from ordinary combustible e.g. paper wood plastic textiles etc class B fire such as flammable liquids and gases e.g. gasoline, kerosene, methane, propane, butane etc, class C fire related to the electrical fire, class D fire related to the burning metals such as magnesium potassium titanium etc class K fire which is known as the kitchen fire to remember this we must put in our mind K for kitchen. A fire extinguisher isn't designed to extinguish a fire that large in fact you're going to run out of chemicals before you get that far along one thing to note when making the decision whether to leave the building or put out a fire is that mostly fire extinguishers only have enough extinguishing agent to last about 30 seconds, in the event of a fire always make the decision that your safety is your priority never put yourself in the position where the fire is blocking you.

 

To use fire extinguisher remember the acronym PASS:

P= pull the pin

A= aim the nozzle

S= squeeze the trigger

S= sweep at base of the fire (left to right and vice versa)

 

Pictures: Clockwise showing inspection tag, pressure gauge and AMC tag of the Fire Extinguisher 

Once fire is out it's not uncommon for the fire to reignite a few minutes later so make sure that you're keeping watch until you're certain that it's out and done, so now you know the basics of fire extinguisher use make sure you go around your work area and check that you have the right fire extinguishers for the type of fuel available also check the fire extinguishers to make sure that they're properly charged and ready to go in case they're ever needed. Thank you so much for reading the blog if you enjoyed this remember to leave a comment and inform us about your experience of using fire extinguisher in a fire situation if you had used ever.