Wildfire Gironde, France
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A major fuel-air tankfarm explosion occurred near tank 912 at the Buncefield oil storage depot in the UK in the early morning of December 11th 2005. The tank overflow and triggered a chain of further explosions, ultimately involving 22 large storage tanks. Only 7 fuel tanks on site were not affected.
About half of the Buncefield complex is dedicated to the storage of aviation fuel for Gatwick, Heathrow and Luton airport. The remainder of the complex stores oil, kerosene, petrol and diesel fuel for petrol stations across much of the South-East of England.
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.
Onsite, three additional HydroSub 150 units served as booster pumps to increase pressure to feed the monitors. Four HydroSubs were specifically used to pump away the enormous amounts of waste water.
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.
