Have you ever actually deployed, hands on, all by yourself, a firer extinguisher? If yes, how did it work for you? If no, do you think you could used one effectively in emergency? Who cleaned up the mess?
I never have.
We had a fire safety thing at work where the local fire department came. One of the things they did was allow people to put out a small fire in the parking lot with a fire extinguisher. I did that.
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StG
I own a Jeep. So, yeah.
I went to aircraft mechanic school and got to use both dry chemical and CO2 extinguishers. When we ran radial engines in test cells someone had to be rear fire guard. That’s standing in the test cell behind the engine with a big CO2 extinguisher on wheels in case there was a fire. Got to use them a few times.
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A couple times, both in our kitchen. Once our toaster oven caught fire; I put it out before anything else was damaged. The second time, I turned on the wrong burner, and wound up burning up a wooden spoon that was sitting in an otherwise empty pot; that time the flames and/or heat also ruined our over-the-range microwave before I was able to put it out.
Always keep a working fire extinguisher in the kitchen, folks.
Just one kitchen fire. The damage would have been much less except I wasted a lot of time pawing through all the uni-taskers before I found the extinguisher.
I never have, fortunately.
I worked for a large research facility that had its own in-house fire department. We did that. They had a large training area (rather than a parking lot) to work in.
Some anecdotes:
They set a wood-and-paper fire for us to put out with water extinguishers. The first group of us put it out. They found some dry spots in the wood-and-paper, lit it again for the second group to put out. They did that. Then they tried to lit it again for the third group, and there weren’t any dry pieces left. Oops.
They let us try wearing those plastic face shields they have. Wow, what a difference. Without them, you can’t get very close to the first because of the heat on your face. With it, you can walk comfortably right up to the fire to spritz it.
They demonstrated a kerosene fire. Interesting factoid: It’s not all that explosively flammable. They showed us that you can toss lit matches into it and the match just goes out. To light it, they had to turn a torch on it for about 30 seconds to raise up enough vapor to catch fire.
Then we blew it out with a CO2 extinguisher. (See subsequent post for details about that.)
They told us about Class D (metal) fires. I vaguely recall they demonstrated one with metal shavings from the fab shop. You simply can’t put these out. Your best bet is to dig a hole, shovel the glowing-white-hot pieces in, bury them, and let it burn itself out in 100 years.
I don’t think they demonstrated a Class E (live electrical) fire.
Note, I just looked at dozens of CO2 extinguisher images on Google Images before I could find one that clearly shows what I want to point out, so the following might all be urban legend. But I think it’s real:
If you haven’t been trained in the use of a CO2 extinguisher, here’s what they taught us that, if true, you’d better know before you try it:
The compressed CO2 expands tremendously as it comes out that funnel-shaped horn of the extinguisher. So it gets freezing cold. So it extinguishes the fire either by cooling it or by suffocating it. If you hold the horn to aim it, it may also freeze your hand to it.
If it has a short length of stiff pipe connecting the valve to the horn, you need to aim it first, and not touch the horn once you squeeze the lever.
If it has a length of flexible rubber hose, then there should also be a place at the base of the horn for you to hold it. Here’s a picture that shows something kind of like that:
The ones they had at that training I went to had a wooden ring around the hose at the base of the funnel, wide enough to put your hand around. You have to hold it by that to aim it.
Wait, it may be even worse: They told us that, not only is your hand going to freeze onto the funnel if you hold that, but (wait for it . . .)
. . . all that CO2 blowing out generates static electricity on the plastic horn. As soon as this reaches a certain voltage, you get a knock-you-on-your-ass shock. This, of course, causes your arm muscle to suddenly jerk back, pulling your hand off the nozzle. And leaving your frozen skin of your palm on the nozzle. :eek:
So don’t do that.
Quote from the web site where I found that picture:
The site also warns against using on Class D (burning metal) fires. It won’t put the fire out, it will just blow the burning pieces all over the place.
A small pan fire. I probably could’ve dealt with it by other means, but it’s what it was there for. I think it was one of those dry extinguishers.
I was a stunt man once and we had these live stunt shows. One part of the show was a guy with a burning coat. During that part of the show I had the fire extinguisher in case something went wrong. One time they didn’t get the coat off of the guy as fast as they should, so I rushed out on the scene and put the fire out with the extinguisher. Everybody was very happy afterwards with the unexpected drama.
I used them quite often in training, only once for real, a genset caught fire when I started it up and I had to put it out with a DCP extinguisher, it did the job quite well although the fire was pretty small
Had a dry chem fire extinguisher ‘fight’ with my brother. We where just playing around. A boys will be boys kind of thing. I was 12, he was 16. Turns out that the powder, on a car, after a light rain is not good for the paint finish. Luckily, it was only his car that was damaged (we lived in the country).
In training: every few months for 35 years now. In the real world: never.
Once, for training, for my company’s emergency response team. IRL, never. And I too own a Jeep.
Yes. In my first apartment I had a candle chandelier hanging in a picture window, about eighteen inches below the wooden window flame, and it ignited the wood. The candle flame was amazingly steady and the smoke plume was pencil thin and concentrated its heat on the wood with amazing precision. This created a burning spot in the wood with cracks and fissures up into the hole, which was glowing orange up inside there. I imagine it was very close to becoming an unfixable situation. I had a fire extinguisher, a beautiful brass one painted red, with a hand pump. It was full of carbon tetrachloride. Note that this was over 40 years ago, at which time most of my possessions were old secondhand junk. I pumped it and aimed its thin stream straight up into the hole and it hissed and went out quickly. There was not much mess, just a few ounces of sooty solvent dribbling out of the hole and splattering onto the window sill below.
I also used one to put out a pan of burning kerosene at work as part of a safety training out in the parking lot, but that did not feel nearly as… special.
Yes, in military training. They tried to make it real-world as they could. There were a bunch of cones, and some had extinguishers under them, and some did not. There were also several barrels, and fires came up randomly out of some and not others. We were positioned far apart, and if a barrel near us burst into fire, we ran to the nearest cone, whoever got there first picked it up, and if it had an extinguisher, then that person picked it up, and kept running to the fire, and put it out.
They were trying to create a high-pressure, snap-decision situation for us, and it was pretty effective. After it was over, everyone who had not gotten to operate a fire extinguisher in the exercise got to operate one just to see what it felt like. I actually had to do the run-cone-grab operate.
This. For us, they had a four foot square metal pan with a shallow pool of gasoline in it. It could be re-lit multiple times with no problem. One of the guys fumbled and hit the instructor’s shoes instead of the fire.
Other than that, the closest I’ve come is the day that one of my kids got bored while I was fixing dinner. He fiddled with and set off the fire extinguisher that was hanging on the wall. The white dust got everywhere. Dinner had to be scrapped. I was not pleased.
Back about ‘78 or so, a VW bus. The old VWs caught fire all the time. A basic dry chemical extinguisher, sweep the base of the flame, it went right out. No drama as far as I was concerned, the VW belonged to a stranger, and the extinguisher was corporate, so my involvement was maybe 5 minuets and zero dollars.
I also still have a coupla small halon extinguishers. I used part one on a kitchen fire. Halon is good stuff. No mess, quick acting, good for any type of fire, and the food on the stove was perfectly fine to eat afterwards. Pity you can’t get it any more.