Incendie de forêt en Gironde, France
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Une explosion majeure d'un parc de réservoirs carburant-air s'est produite près du réservoir 912 du dépôt pétrolier de Buncefield, au Royaume-Uni, au petit matin du11 décembre 2005. Le débordement du réservoir a déclenché une série d'autres explosions, qui ont finalement touché 22 grands réservoirs de stockage. Seuls 7 réservoirs de carburant sur le site n'ont pas été touchés.
Environ la moitié du complexe de Buncefield est consacrée au stockage de carburant aviation pour les aéroports de Gatwick, Heathrow et Luton. Le reste du complexe stocke du pétrole, du kérosène, de l'essence et du diesel pour les stations-service de la majeure partie du sud-est de l'Angleterre.
Emergency services declared a major incident at 06:08 and began firefighting efforts using large quantity of foam. However, the fixed water supply system was damaged, and on-site water sources were insufficient for the planned response.
Firefighting experts identified a reservoir with a capacity of 35 million litres, located 1.8 km from the incident site. This source was inaccessible for conventional suction pumps, but Hytrans mobile systems provided the needed solution. Other water sources couldn’t be used or didn’t hold enough water to guarantee a longer-term water supply.
At the water source, 6 Hytrans mobile HydroSub 150 units were installed. Each pump extracted 4200 liters per minute using a 6″ hoseline. This means in totaal 25.000 liters of water per minute (6600 GPM) was pumped from the reservoir.
Sur place, trois unités HydroSub supplémentaires ont servi de pompes de surpression pour augmenter la pression alimentant les moniteurs. Quatre HydroSubs ont été spécialement utilisées pour pomper les énormes quantités d'eaux usées.
Without the mobile units from Hytrans, this complete setup would, at that time and in that situation, have required 180 standard firefighting applications and at least double the personnel.
Thirty-two thousand liters of foam per minute were directed against the fire for just over four hours, after which the pumping rate was reduced. Half of the 20 individual fires were reported extinguished by midday.
Using HoseBoxes with 3,000 metres of hose each, 12 lines of 6” hose were deployed. In total, 33,000 metres of hose (which is over 3 times the height of the Mount Everest) were deployed within one hour. Recovery of all hose took approximately eight hours. The system performed a task that would normally require 160 firefighting vehicles.
