Abstract
Effective firefighting of major fires in fuel storage plants can effectively prevent or delay fire spread (domino effect) and eventually extinguish the fire. If the number of firefighting crew and equipment is sufficient, firefighting will include the suppression of all the burning units and cooling of all the exposed units. However, when available resources are not adequate, fire brigades would need to optimally allocate their resources by answering the question “which burning units to suppress first and which exposed units to cool first?” until more resources become available from nearby industrial plants or residential communities. The present study is an attempt to answer the foregoing question by developing a graph theoretic methodology. It has been demonstrated that suppression and cooling of units with the highest out-closeness index will result in an optimum firefighting strategy. A comparison between the outcomes of the graph theoretic approach and an approach based on influence diagram has shown the efficiency of the graph approach.
Highlights
Small fire incidents are a common characteristic of industrial plants containing or processing combustible and flammable substances
Engineered fire protection systems such as sprinkler systems are effective in tackling small fires and reducing the probability of small fires escalating to fire domino effects [14], but have reportedly proven ineffective in the event of major fires and already-initiated fire domino effects; this has mainly been due to damage, malfunction, or low performance of engineered fire protection systems when exposed to severe heat of fires [15,16,17,18]
We developed methodologies based on graph theory and influence diagrams
Summary
Small fire incidents are a common characteristic of industrial plants containing or processing combustible and flammable substances. Major fires, despite their low-probability, are among the most feared types of industrial accidents due to their catastrophic consequences in terms of loss of lives and assets and a multitude of costly resources needed to control and extinguish them. Due to the importance of major fires and fire domino effects, many works have been devoted to their modelling and risk assessment [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The works devoted to the key role of firefighting in controlling and delaying fire spread have been very few [19,20]
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