Method for comparison of different fire extinguishing technologies – Part 1.
Sometimes the management of a Storage Site has to face with the problem of comparison and choosing the possibly best tank fire extinguishing strategy and technology to protect their tanks.
The comparison usually happens when new tanks are intended to build, or the Tank Farm is so old that a complete overhauling is necessary.
The responsible person is usually the Fire Chief, fire engineer or the designer of the tanks. Anyhow, someone must make a decision, that solves the problem for the next 20 years.
The comparison is not easy, because there are no methods known or learned in schools to compare the different technologies. For an engineer it is not acceptable to tell that “this technology is sympathetic, the other one has low respect caused by several fails”. An expert understands figures.
If we could find a method for comparison of fire fighting technologies for storage tanks, that should provide us with qualification numbers, like 16, or 25. The decision would be much easier.
Does anyone know a method which gives appropriate qualification of the efficiency of the different technologies by giving figures that were based on experiments or any kind of correct measurement?