168 - Fires in Waste Industry with Ragni Fjellgaard Mikalsen

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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In today's episode of the Fire Science Show we're gonna talk about some serious fire protection engineering and we're gonna talk about fire protection engineering of very interesting facilities that are waste handling, waste processing and waste storage facilities.

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I've never dreamt about talking about garbage in this podcast, but it seems a very important case, at least from the societal point of view, a very challenging case from the fire safety engineering point of view, and in fact it seems like a growing business that many of us will be eventually involved in.

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So I truly believe it's something that fire science shows should cover.

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I've also found a really good guest to talk about this.

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That is Ragnhild Gerts Mikkelsen from Rise Fire Research in Norway.

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That is Ragni Fjellgat Mikkelsen from Rise Fire Research in Norway, and some time ago I had Brian Mitchum and Margaret McNamee in the podcast talking about their handbook on environmental effects of fires.

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Ragni was one of the authors of the chapters in that handbook and of course her chapter was related to managing waste facility fires.

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I've also had the chapter in that book about modeling and environmental impact of fires and those chapters kind of go hand to hand and since we did that book a few years ago.

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I've wanted to have Ragdian on the show, and here she is talking about the challenges she's met.

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I assume garbage may not sound that interesting to many of you in the audience, but please believe me when I say that this episode will be highly relevant for most of the fire safety engineers Because, besides the specific problems of waste processing and waste storage, we talk about a lot of very interesting general engineering advice on how you do fire safety engineering.

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Treat this as an interesting case study and I am sure that even if you don't work with facilities of this type in your professional career yet, you will benefit from this episode.

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And, like always, talking to Ragni is just fun, so I can recommend listening to this episode just on the basis of that.

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So, without further ado, let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Without further ado, let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Welcome to the Firesize Show.

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My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host.

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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I am here today joined by Ragni Fjelgaard-Mikkelsen from RISE Fire Research in Norway.

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Hey, ragni, good to have you in the podcast.

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Hi, hi, thanks for inviting me.

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What a beautiful day to talk about garbage right.

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Absolutely, and of course, it's not garbage, it's a resource oh yeah, yeah, we'll get to that.

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you're already dropping bombs on the podcast, come on, so down.

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But indeed we're gonna talk about something which for some is garbage, for some is resource and for fire safety engineers is perhaps a new field in which fire safety engineering has to be done, and apparently a lot which fire safety engineering has to be done and apparently a lot of fire safety engineering has to be done in this space.

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We are talking about everything from storing garbage on landfills up to recycling facilities, and that's a hell of an industry.

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And my first question is I know you have background in smoldering was this the thing that pushed you into investigating these types of facilities, or what were your pathways to to invest your time in understanding the fiscality, engineering of, of landfills and and recycling?

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well, I mean, my background in smoldering was certainly one of the reasons why I found this topic very interesting, because there is a lot of smouldering challenges in the industry.

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And then, yeah, well, rise Fire Research has a collaboration with Norwegian authorities and the Norwegian authorities for civil protection.

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They saw that this was an increasing challenge and so, in collaboration with them, we started a project back in I think it was 2018 or 19, to sort of make a survey of the situation in Norway at that time.

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And when we're talking about those types of facilities, let's perhaps define the types of facilities what one could find in the world.

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That's like starting with a pile of garbage in the forest, which is perhaps the worst way to store garbage, and I hate people who do that Up to like Copenhagen ski slope super clean and fancy trash burning facilities.

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Maybe you can give me what's in between those two.

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Yeah, so you have landfills that some are illegal and some have historically been legal, and those would be outdoor, unprotected from the weather.

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Any type of fire there, any type of runoff or spillage would just go straight into the environment.

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And then you have some types of waste storage that is outside but on like a solid ground, like asphalt, and that would be one type of kind of legal storage option asphalt, and that would be one type of kind of legal storage option.

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And then you get the same type but you build a small building over it like some sort of protection against weather and wind.

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And then you have the more fancy ones where you have indoor storage or you have collection of any spillage and then the waste has to be collected and then it has to be sorted and then it has to be utilized somehow.

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So yeah, those are like the primary differences between the different types, and then you have, depending on the type of waste, you have very many different types of regulations.

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In Norway the main difference is hazardous waste or non-hazardous waste.

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That sort of decides what type of storage and treatment facility you go into.

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And in Nordic countries or in Norway, which types were prevalent when you started this research?

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Was it these covered warehouses or did you have a lot of landfills that were transformed at the time?

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Well, landfills and illegal landfills are not that widespread in the Nordic countries.

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We see a lot more of that around the world, especially in development countries.

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So, yeah, the majority of the facilities that we are looking at are legal and on solid ground asphalt or concrete or something and then some are indoors and some are outdoors.

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All kinds of I guess along the identification by the roof and the surface there's also like increase in how well it's sorted right, because I would imagine on some sort of landfills you would just drop everything in one giant pile and I believe that's what was happening in my country, let's say 20 years ago that that's how the industry worked.

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Now we're sorting the trash and it's being collected into different trucks, so I assume there's already a level of sorting of that trash where it goes and I assume in the highest level facilities.

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When you think about utilizing those resources, you have to have the highest level of sorting.

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Is this also something that distinguishes the fire safety challenges and something that has to be predefined before you start fire safety engineering?

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Yeah, like you're saying, sorting is really important to be able to really use the different resources.

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And at least in the Nordics and the Scandinavia you have very little, just big piles of mixed waste these days.

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So the majority of any types of mixed waste is generally being sorted, yeah, in quite fancy sorting facilities.

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The machines and everything that sort of goes into and the technology that goes into getting everything sorted is quite fascinating.

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And well, I was a bit surprised to find that, that, for example, if you have a paper and cardboard facility, I thought maybe the building would be the most expensive thing, but in fact the trash or the resource is something that is very valuable there, but the sorting machine can cost what?

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10, 100 times more than the facility or the building itself.

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So if you have like a big fire in one of those waste facilities, it's not at all a problem if the building burns up in terms of like economics, but it can be a problem if the waste burns or in fact if the machine burns up.

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Then you have a real economic challenge.

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It is really funny.

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I see a lot of similarities with the general history of fire safety engineering.

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You know, for me the storage facilities or waste storage in general would not be a subject of fire safety engineering.

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In my professional education I have learned nothing about it, like literally nothing, and I see that as we go into more complex ways of sorting, storing, utilizing, you get those costs that you've mentioned machines and everything, if you think about it.

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At the late 19th century there was also a reason why the fire safety engineering to some extent was brought up because there were factories which suddenly, you know, were organized around the big steam engines where you had the power source and you suddenly had a mass amount of equipment and, you know, wealth around those machines and you had to protect them.

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That's how at least the industrial branch of fire safety engineering was sponsored here.

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It's funny that 150 years later you're observing the same thing when talking about these types of facilities yeah, I mean.

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So you have the economic aspect of it and that's's really really a key driver, but then you also have the environmental aspect.

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So this is what is pushing the need to be sorting the waste, but this is also pushing a change in how we store the waste and what kind of facilities we have.

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So, when it comes to environmental considerations, you have this competition between fire safety and environmental considerations, because for the environment it's best if the trash or the waste is stored indoors, protected from weather and on a spill safe place.

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But from a fire safety perspective, if there's a fire's easier, if you know the smoke and the heat and everything can, just, you know, be emitted without being trapped inside of a building.

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So there's this like balance or competition between fire safety and environment.

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That is kind of interesting.

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And then also in terms of environment, there's like huge challenges for the fire service if there is a fire.

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What you just brought up is the exact reason why I wanted this podcast episode.

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I'm not that much excited about garbage, but it shows a super interesting dynamic that I believe will be more and more present over all the fire safety engineering, and that is the external consequences of fires, or the environmental consequences of fires, you know.

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And with landfills or waste facility fires, it's just obvious, right you've, if you have a landfill that's 10 000 square meters and it burns down, you see the fire plume from, or the smoke plume from 100 kilometers.

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It affects people in such a vast area and at the same time, it's quite obvious, it's toxic smoke.

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I mean, come on, it's a garbage pile that has been burning, right?

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So indeed, in here, the environmental considerations of fires are a subject of a public discussion, whereas you can have a warehouse burned down which also is 10,000 square meters and also has all the types of goods.

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You can have a warehouse burned down which also is 10,000 square meters and also has all the types of goods you can have in it, and I don't really see those environmental discussions going on with those fires, even though they happen.

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So sometimes you have those discussions, but it's not like when the landfill burns down, that's the first thing that's brought up.

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You know, close your windows.

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It's toxic, right?

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Every smoke is toxic.

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I believe that solutions or pathways that will be developed for this field will very well translate into general industrial fire safety engineering or perhaps even urban scale fire safety engineering, because if you have a big chunk of your city burning, that's also similar.

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What do you think about it?

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Do you see this as a driver?

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Yeah, I mean, if there is a fire in the landfill, you have heaps of different kinds of toxins and the smoke right.

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So there is no smoke that is healthy.

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I mean you have heavy metals, you have greenhouse gases, you have a lot of different things that are not good for people or for the environment.

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You have a lot of different things that are not good for people or for the environment.

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And then also you have this, just the massive scale of it all.

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If you have a massive pile of waste that burns, and the massive challenge of being able to stop this from propagating, for the fire service makes these types of fires quite extensive, and I mean they can go on for weeks and weeks.

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And, yeah, we have examples of landfill fires just burning for years and years, and so the drastic consequences, both for the neighbors around and like more far away, but also for the environment, is quite severe.

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And then, once you start extinguishing efforts, if your extinguishing efforts are to dig everything out, get rid of the fuel, then you have to send your personnel into these smoke plumes with dig excavators.

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If your approach is to drench it with water, you have challenges with, first of all, just getting the water where it needs to be, but also the massive, massive amounts of water that is needed to actually extinguish.

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And then you have challenges with water runoff and polluting nearby waterways and, yeah, a lot of different environmental aspects and also for the aspects that are for the neighbors.

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So it's very common that I see that you know there's a big smoke plume and then sometimes the news stories go.

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We are not certain if the smoke is dangerous or not, but perhaps close your windows.

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My rule of thumb is that if you can smell it, it means it's present in the air, and if you can see it, it's too much.

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So if media, you would like this rule of thumb, I think, based on my experience with measuring smoke, it's pretty decent in terms of what's safe.

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If you can see it, there's already too much of it.

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You have a book chapter in the Handbook of Fires and Environment, high five.

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What a great book, right.

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And in this chapter you talk about this exactly, which is mitigating the hazards from fires in waste facilities.

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I like that you bring some interesting examples from US, from Canada, from Norway, about those fires.

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Perhaps you would like to comment on some of them.

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Yeah, so if we go for an example, in 2014, there was a large fire in a landfill in Canada and yeah, as we write in the book, that fire went on between may and all the way to to september.

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So that just gives you some aspect of like how long time this fire was going on.

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and this is just it's ridiculous to give the length of of the fire in months, like from may to september.

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That's like wow, yep and then, yeah, the researchers who were studying this specific fires.

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They also did some air pollution measurements.

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There was significant air pollution, not just close to the fire location, but like just kilometers and kilometers away.

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Yeah, I mean, this particular landfill was up to 12 meters deep and you can just imagine the firefighting efforts that were needed to sort of get into the burning zone and to get into where the fire was actually going on.

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So it was, uh, yeah quite extensive.

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I don't want to offend anyone, but this really is a first world problem.

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Like everyone has garbage, and actually the uh rich, the richer the country is, I would assume they produce more garbage and more.

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So it's interesting to see a fire that takes many months in Canada and it's very challenging to burn it down.

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I can give you some examples from Poland.

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We also had a very severe waste fire problem in Poland, and that was between, let's say, 2017 and 2020.

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I think that was the pinnacle of it.

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I actually found a report from the Polish authorities which say that there was overall 754 fires of waste storage facilities, 750 fires.

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That's a lot of fires and each of them was large and, what's even worse, that most of those fires were an outcome of crime.

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Those were literally either arson or fires resulting from abandonment of the facility.

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You know, no more maintenance, no more checking out, went on and on and on until a fire happened to it.

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I would say Poland had a massive, massive issue with those types of fires and at that point we were really considered about the environmental effects of those, because you suddenly have hundreds of those fires and those balloons start to combine.

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It's not longer a single fire problem that you can trace, but you have in the air the results of multiple fires at the same time.

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What's good is that after 2020, new legislation was introduced and those numbers fell down significantly, and also because of the police activity, I would say the arson aspect of that has reduced, but still we had a massive, massive problem with that.

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But it's also interesting to go a bit into this how many fires are there really?

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Because there's a huge underreporting.

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You think so, and where does that underreporting come from?

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And what's underreported, like small fires or yeah, well, I mean when we started looking into fires in waste facilities in norway, we went into the national statistics to look at the reported fires, so those would be any fire where the fire service has been called to, and so that number was quite low.

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It was just about 150 fires over a few years.

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But then we talked to insurance companies and they had a larger number, because not every fire you need or the facility feels they need the fire service for, and then you have near haps or near misses and smaller fires that the facility takes care of themselves the fire service doesn't know about, so small incidents that could have become large, those are not a part of the statistics.

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And then also you have the fires that occur and are being put out in the location but you don't tell your boss Because then you just get into this HSE trouble and the reporting and so on, trouble and the reporting and so on.

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So I mean the total number of fire that happens every day.

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I would assume there is at least a small and medium or medium-scale fire every day in Norway in a waste facility.

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If that is true, then it's a big problem for fire safety engineering because it actually prevents you from doing good risk analysis right.

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If your probability is off and we're not just interested about big fires, we're interested about all fires to track the potential growth pathways, hazards you know, establish how big the fire could have been, what's the probability, what's the fault tree if you don't have that first number the number of ignitions, then the fire safety engineering in in general is difficult.

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Yeah, for sure, and it very much limits us.

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I mean, we can't really learn from these fires and from the sunshine stories if we don't know about them.

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So this is one thing that we're working on in the Frike Fire Research and Innovation Center is learning from fires and evaluating also smaller incidents that have happened, not just in waste facilities but in general, because we need this knowledge to be able to figure out which measures work and which don't.

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Is industry working with you?

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Do you find industrial support for that?

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I had an interview with Guillermo some time ago.

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We were talking about wind turbines and he had a similar problem.

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There's a lot of fires that are unknown, they're not reported.

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They can rely almost on media coverage of those fires, which is the worst statistic you can imagine, right, and the manufacturers, the owners, must know how many of them burned down and they would not cooperate giving that number.

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So I wonder, is this industry more supportive towards the resurgent, if they're helping you, or is again a struggle to frankenstein?

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the probabilities from different types of different sources of data yeah, well, I mean good data and good statistics is always challenging within the fire world, no matter what, and one of the biggest challenges I see with the waste sector is that it's it's quite fragmented.

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I mean you have just in Norway, where we're not that big of a nation in terms of population, but we have 650 waste facilities around Norway, and I mean there are very many different types of organizations.

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Some are public, some are like half public and some are private.

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Some are very, very small and local, some are regional and some are private.

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Some are very, very small and local, some are regional and some are national.

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So I mean all of the waste facilities that we are in contact with.

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They are very aware of, or most are at least very aware of the challenge, but they don't necessarily have the resources to do something about it themselves.

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So we need research projects where more of them are coming together and can join forces, and that's a bit of a challenge in a world where they need to make money and need to have their production going and to see fire safety as a helpful thing and not just a finger pointing.

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With here a grain of salt.

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It's about Norway, high-tech facilities, and perhaps in the different parts of the world where you would just have outdoor storage, this lack of reporting or statistics could be even more difficult to obtain.

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I don't know, perhaps I would assume.

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So Anyway, let's try to move on into mitigation.

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And well, technically, before we start mitigating fires, let's discuss how the fires come by.

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So let's talk about the typical ignition patterns.

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You've researched that.

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So what did you see about ignition in those facilities?

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Is it any different from other industries?

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Well, in our studies and also the studies that my colleagues at RISE in Sweden have done, we have asked the industry where they have seen ignition and what they perceive as the largest problem areas.

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So our numbers are based on self-reporting, but in that data, self-ignition is by far the largest one.

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Define self-ignition.

00:23:45.855 --> 00:23:58.277
Yeah, we have seen there's a bit of an issue with misunderstandings around the word self-ignition, because there's three different things that the industry itself is talking about when they're saying self-ignition.

00:23:58.277 --> 00:24:01.883
So they're saying what I would think about that self-ignition with.

00:24:01.883 --> 00:24:08.661
Which is biomass, that's decomposing and self-igniting, and there's a smoldering fire sub-ground.

00:24:08.661 --> 00:24:21.269
And then the other one is that if you have thermal runaway in a battery that's mechanically damaged or something inside your waste pile, that is also reported often as self-ignition.

00:24:21.269 --> 00:24:24.605
And then the third version is friction heat.

00:24:24.605 --> 00:24:37.265
So there's a lot of mechanical handling of the waste and so when you have friction heat, for example in your handling thing, this is also sometimes reported as self-ignition.

00:24:37.795 --> 00:24:48.402
So even if the data says that self-ignition is by far the most common, then actually it's composting to self-ignition thermal runaway and friction heat.

00:24:48.402 --> 00:24:50.082
Those would be the most common ones.

00:24:50.082 --> 00:24:53.304
A lot of big fraction is unknown.

00:24:53.304 --> 00:24:55.602
And then it's re-ignition.

00:24:55.602 --> 00:25:01.715
We thought the fire was out, we came back three days later and then it came back, and then you have very small shares.

00:25:01.715 --> 00:25:05.482
That is, arson and technical errors and hot works.

00:25:06.285 --> 00:25:34.324
Obviously, I would say in poland I don't have good statistics, but seeing that there was 700 something fires and most of them are a case of criminal proceedings and I would say arson would be the highest, or negligence, which is also like a part of the of the problem, when I was looking through your paper, you have a paper in 570 journal about some of the statistics, as I find it really interesting, and there's a table that that shows those different types of facilities.

00:25:34.324 --> 00:25:41.906
And one thing that kills me is that you have a table that shows ignition frequency and it's very rarely, rarely often.

00:25:41.906 --> 00:25:53.023
And then there's a value I've never seen in my life which is regularly Like wow, I've never seen ignition frequency being described as regular.

00:25:53.023 --> 00:25:54.741
Is it really that often?

00:25:55.701 --> 00:25:56.674
Yeah, for sure.

00:25:56.674 --> 00:26:07.229
This is an industry and a fuel type and a handling procedure and so on that sort of leads to quite regular fires.

00:26:07.229 --> 00:26:16.190
It's a massive challenge, as I said, both for economics and for the environment and for the fire service, that these fires are happening all the time.

00:26:16.190 --> 00:26:19.805
Some are very small and some grow to be large.

00:26:19.805 --> 00:26:24.318
Them some are very small and some grow to be large.

00:26:24.318 --> 00:26:37.699
So, yeah, no, we made like an overall sort of fire risk combination where we looked at all of the different common waste fractions and then we tried to sort them into sort of a traffic light system where do the authorities really need to make an effort and to have a focus?

00:26:37.699 --> 00:26:42.048
And, yeah, which fractions are not that high risk?

00:26:42.048 --> 00:26:47.382
And then we base this on both how often the fire starts and also what can happen.

00:26:48.296 --> 00:26:55.042
If listeners would like to learn more about those traffic lights and how those facilities match each other like what are the risks in particular facilities?

00:26:55.042 --> 00:26:57.262
The paper is listed in the show notes.

00:26:57.262 --> 00:27:14.645
Later in the paper, on a more general note, you list mitigation measures, which are subdivided into design and layout of the facility, organization and plans, reception of waste, handling of waste and storage, and then actions during and after the fire.

00:27:14.645 --> 00:27:16.355
I find this well.

00:27:16.355 --> 00:27:18.140
It's different than the typical.

00:27:18.140 --> 00:27:21.057
You know layers of fire safety you would find in fire safety engineering.

00:27:21.057 --> 00:27:23.204
You know detection, suppression, compartmentation and so on.

00:27:23.204 --> 00:27:27.846
So perhaps let's follow your distinction into those fields.

00:27:27.846 --> 00:27:30.479
Let's start with design and layouting the facility.

00:27:30.479 --> 00:27:35.229
How critical that is in providing safe space to store and process waste.

00:27:35.855 --> 00:27:41.928
The main challenge with giving some general thoughts here is the scale of the industry.

00:27:41.928 --> 00:27:52.539
It's from everything from like a small local reception facility to these large ones that handle all the waste from all of Oslo, for example.

00:27:52.539 --> 00:28:06.241
So in terms of design of the facility, in some types of waste fractions and for some types of facility, this can really be key and for some it will make no difference in terms of fire safety, and the same with also with the other ones.

00:28:06.714 --> 00:28:42.607
We have a report from both from the Norwegian work and also from the Swedish work that goes much more into detail about what could be done in different types of waste fractions and facilities that we can probably share a link or something to all of these absolutely absolutely, absolutely yes, and as I said in, in poland we had the issue with the fires of those facilities up to, let's say, 2020, and then a new law was instigated and with this new law, it's a very lengthy act of law that gives you all the technical details how one should build a landfill.

00:28:42.607 --> 00:28:51.148
But if I was to summarize it to some extent, I would say not too much in one place and separate them.

00:28:56.577 --> 00:29:08.724
And I think it plays along very well to have teeny, tiny piles of waste with lots of space in between and have very clean fractions with only one type of material in it.

00:29:09.045 --> 00:29:24.096
But in reality I mean both the amount of waste that needs to be handled but also economic aspects of actually running this business means that you have to store in larger piles than would be ideal for never having a fire.

00:29:24.096 --> 00:29:39.159
So you are in situations where you need to have lots of waste stored in piles, and then so it's a matter of understanding your specific waste fraction and knowing sort of the storage height that would be appropriate for that one.

00:29:39.159 --> 00:29:46.691
And then we also see a lot of challenges with design of the facility being a bit like on paper.

00:29:46.691 --> 00:29:54.868
So I visited a paper sorting facility where they had a compartment station with brick walls.

00:29:54.868 --> 00:30:11.625
Problem was that the brick walls were three meters high and the waste pile was nine meters high, and so of course, it was just spilling over the top of it, and so the thought from the start didn't really match with the amount of storage that was going on there.

00:30:12.115 --> 00:30:33.265
I think when you receive a new project to work on as a fire safety engineer, it could be a nice lifecycle assessment, like how those piles will grow over time, what amount of waste you estimate to have, and really design those separations and distances accordingly, because I see a value in compartmentation.

00:30:33.265 --> 00:30:42.525
It's definitely easier to deal with the smaller piles in terms of watering, in terms, like you said, excavating, removing fuel, moving out the fuel.

00:30:42.525 --> 00:30:49.990
Actually, here in your recommendation, the safety measure is, for example, to ensure space for relocation of material.

00:30:49.990 --> 00:30:56.733
I find this very interesting to make sure that you probably don't want your pile to go over your hydrants and so on.

00:30:56.733 --> 00:31:15.376
And there's also a design for detection of fires and automatic stop of processes.

00:31:15.376 --> 00:31:18.775
How is detection done in facilities like that?

00:31:18.775 --> 00:31:23.085
Do you rely on smoke detection, heat detection, linear heat detection?

00:31:23.526 --> 00:31:27.576
Yeah, I mean you see all sorts of different approaches to detection.

00:31:27.576 --> 00:31:52.211
Some is dependent on what type of facility you have and some is dependent on the fuel and some is just.

00:31:52.211 --> 00:31:58.613
But also for extinguishment technology we see that there are quite a few cases where the documentation is missing.

00:31:58.613 --> 00:32:01.845
Appropriate and relevant documentation is missing.

00:32:02.666 --> 00:32:09.224
You have these big heaps of mass on the landfill and there's moldering fire being growing inside.

00:32:09.224 --> 00:32:13.272
Is there any reliable means to detect that was the industrial?

00:32:13.292 --> 00:32:17.347
yeah that is a big challenge for the detection companies.

00:32:17.347 --> 00:32:19.273
I mean the.

00:32:19.273 --> 00:32:34.440
The amount of smoke that comes to the surface is often much too little to be able to detect it with any kind of high-tech detection and also, depending on what is burning, the type of emissions are not that easily to predict.

00:32:34.440 --> 00:32:49.144
So often we see any type of smoke or heat or I mean IR-based or other types of detection is not really functioning in that connection.

00:32:49.144 --> 00:32:55.727
Types of detection is not really functioning in that connection and yeah, we've seen several instances where the human nose was actually the better detector than all of the high-tech solutions.

00:32:55.727 --> 00:33:02.765
So yeah, those piles that have sub-grounds moldering, they keep being a big challenge.

00:33:02.765 --> 00:33:18.801
I think just awareness and knowledge in the industry about that being a problem is an important step towards sort of understanding that they need to be aware of storage heights and moisture content in their storage piles and so on.

00:33:18.801 --> 00:33:27.117
But yeah, no fantastic one solution to solve that problem has been invented as far as I know like, okay, you mentioned it.

00:33:27.238 --> 00:33:36.030
It emits slowly or in such low amounts that it's difficult to detect it, but it can last for months, like we just discussed the fire in canada that lasted from may to september.

00:33:36.030 --> 00:34:03.219
So I actually wondered that, from environmental point of view or environmental safety point of view, like what's actually worse, this one massive black plume that you can see from 100 kilometers, or a smoldering fire that goes for a year, like which would yield more nasty stuff into the environment yeah, I mean if we're, if we're outdoor and we're in the landfill and the landfill is of a certain scale, you're more than I mean.

00:34:03.378 --> 00:34:04.867
It's 100 guarantee.

00:34:04.867 --> 00:34:08.938
There are a few smoldering fires subground there at any given time.

00:34:08.938 --> 00:34:17.255
So those emissions they happen all the time and the scale of it has not been documented to my knowledge.

00:34:17.255 --> 00:34:32.518
But if we compare with like peat fires of Indonesia, we know that even if you don't see the smoke with your eyes and even if you can't smell it all the time, the emission from the smoldering fires can be quite significant.

00:34:33.244 --> 00:34:37.876
Yeah, I believe the number for Indonesian pit fires was in one of the top years.

00:34:37.876 --> 00:34:43.838
It was similar to the entire emissions of carbon dioxide in Europe, which is like mind-breaking if you think about it.

00:34:43.838 --> 00:34:45.550
Okay, let's move on.

00:34:45.550 --> 00:34:49.045
Let's skip organization and plans, because that's boring stuff, you know.

00:34:49.045 --> 00:34:54.554
Prepare documentation, prepare for it the usual things you would have to do.

00:34:54.554 --> 00:34:59.373
Let's move to some more specific things, and the next point in your list is reception of waste.

00:34:59.373 --> 00:35:20.157
And here it's interesting because here's where I guess this reception point is the first place you would do your fire safety engineering for, and also the way how you receive the trash and the processes that you do when you receive will significantly change the hazards at every stage later.

00:35:20.217 --> 00:35:41.753
Right, yeah, knowing what is coming into your facility and figuring out if the waste fraction that you're told is coming in is actually correct, knowing if there are impurities in your waste fractions that are coming in, and also trying to figure out how to decrease the amount of impurities.

00:35:42.014 --> 00:35:51.489
So in your paper and cardboard, for example, how can we avoid that there are batteries in these birthday cards that you open and that sings?

00:35:51.489 --> 00:36:03.969
How can we avoid that sort of upstream to try to inform, yeah, you and me when we are in our kitchen and we decide where do we throw this birthday card away?

00:36:03.969 --> 00:36:09.226
Do I throw it in dangerous hazardous waste or do I throw it in the paper and card bin?

00:36:09.226 --> 00:36:16.108
So, like, having awareness upstream and also having routines for checking what's coming in is really important.

00:36:16.108 --> 00:36:40.407
But if I can just mention this boring part, organization and plans this is actually what makes hazardous waste not go to the top of the traffic lights, because hazardous waste is actually in the, not in the red zone, but it is in the orange zone, and this surprised us that this was our result okay, can you define hazardous waste?

00:36:41.289 --> 00:36:52.586
hazardous waste in scandinavia would be oil, paints, batteries at least yeah, if you have spray cans or explosives.

00:36:52.586 --> 00:37:04.030
The thing is that we think this is because it's called hazardous waste, so there's an awareness already just from the name, and this makes the facilities have really good organizations and plans in place.

00:37:04.030 --> 00:37:13.192
They have really good systems, they're really good at sorting, they're really good at sorting, they're really good at reception, and so to a lot bigger extent than we see in the rest of the industry.

00:37:13.192 --> 00:37:16.532
So it's a boring point, but it's an interesting one.

00:37:17.086 --> 00:37:17.668
Good, good, good.

00:37:17.668 --> 00:37:19.853
I knew it's important.

00:37:19.853 --> 00:37:25.693
I just really wanted to make sure we read the fire operations within the hour of the interview.

00:37:25.693 --> 00:37:28.733
Let's move to handling and storage.

00:37:28.733 --> 00:37:33.313
So this is organization of the waste stacks and maintaining them.

00:37:33.313 --> 00:37:38.914
You've said something previously about maintaining moisture and temperatures of those facilities.

00:37:38.914 --> 00:37:46.597
Is this really something you can control for in those huge piles, or is it just a matter of environment in which the pile is growing?

00:37:47.164 --> 00:37:49.010
Yeah, well, I mean for indoor storage.

00:37:49.010 --> 00:37:54.414
You certainly can, to a certain degree, control it, and other than that, it's also about awareness.

00:37:54.414 --> 00:38:08.715
So if you have an outdoor storage area and you have a raining period, maybe you need to look at limiting the storage pile size during the period of lots of rain, or to look at if you can have more frequent rotation of the piles.

00:38:08.715 --> 00:38:36.119
If, if you need to have long-term storage, then maybe you need to rotate, or if you can sell more of your waste during that time to limit the hazard of or the danger of having ignition, then those types of things could be key to avoiding these self-ignition based fires okay, and if you had like a facility that is going through like some sort of reorganization?

00:38:36.460 --> 00:38:47.079
let's say I have a massive landfill and my city decides that they want to have a modern facility, how often do those landfills would go through a resorting process like in other ways?

00:38:47.079 --> 00:38:56.824
How often you would return to the same stack of waste and reprocess it, and perhaps you have seen some processes of that.

00:38:56.824 --> 00:38:58.811
Are there any hazards specific to that?

00:38:59.454 --> 00:39:04.168
um rotation of the whole pile would not be very applicable in landfills.

00:39:04.168 --> 00:39:37.378
That's not very often as far as I know, but it's more if you have um storage of a pile of, let's say, wood chips or something and then you are just waiting for it to be sold to a some sort of wood industry or um, if you have a pile of cardboard or something, then if you have some sort of downtown downtime time in your facility and then it needs to be stored for a long time, then you might need to consider moving it about, because we know at least self-initiation happens once the pile is being left alone for quite some time.

00:39:37.945 --> 00:39:40.556
Because, alternatively, I also see this in Poland.

00:39:40.556 --> 00:39:54.798
In some places we have these mountains of trash which literally are like mountains and they're now covered with the ground and I they seem to be a part of the landscape now and they're most likely being left alone.

00:39:54.798 --> 00:40:05.652
I wonder if in 30 years, someone will say oh, there's too much resource in that pile, let's open it up, and then then start sorting well, I mean, there are some piles or mountains.

00:40:05.992 --> 00:40:13.697
Well, for example, in in magdeburg, I know they are taking out some methane from this waste mountain and utilizing it.

00:40:13.697 --> 00:40:18.992
So even if it's just left there alone, there are some options to to use it for something.

00:40:18.992 --> 00:40:29.797
But I'm I wouldn't expect it to be very widespread, but from environmental considerations it could touch well I'm you never know with.

00:40:29.838 --> 00:40:29.898
Uh.

00:40:29.898 --> 00:40:50.719
In regards of digging through the landfill, I think the case I had and that was the funniest was a guy who threw up a hard drive with like thousands of bitcoins when they were worth nothing and after sometimes they've realized it's not worth like millions and millions and they were actually digging through the landfill to find the hard drive.

00:40:50.719 --> 00:40:52.324
I have no clue if they were successful.

00:40:52.324 --> 00:41:06.369
Perhaps some of the listeners know the follow-up of this story, but that was certainly a recovery mission to find that one hard drive with the with bitcoins on it anyway, let let we've reached the, the during and after the fire.

00:41:07.010 --> 00:41:19.496
So I I wonder, from the fire safety engineer perspective, what are the actions that we do that improve the ability of firefighters to act and reduce the grade scale?

00:41:19.496 --> 00:41:30.114
Because, okay, if you think about fire safety engineering for the environment, it's perhaps the biggest fires that we're worried the most, because they would lead to most of these large emissions.

00:41:30.114 --> 00:41:35.264
Minus the smoldering fires, the most imminent acute hazards would be the largest fires.

00:41:35.264 --> 00:41:42.976
How firesite engineering acts in here and how we support the firefighters Any particular things that we should be aware and worried about?

00:41:43.545 --> 00:41:44.431
That's a good question.

00:41:44.431 --> 00:41:52.650
Stopping the smaller fires from growing large would probably be the one thing where you can really make a big difference.

00:41:52.650 --> 00:42:02.360
And then that really depends on what type of waste we have and what type of waste facility we have.

00:42:02.360 --> 00:42:24.010
Place for collection of runoff water in particular, and it's not necessarily just for fire safety engineers, but also just when you plan the facility, to make sure that the fire service and the facility and the fire safety engineering community speaks together to figure out like what are this specific facilities biggest risk.

00:42:24.010 --> 00:42:29.659
I think that's uh important to be able to communicate a bit on that before the fire happens.

00:42:29.885 --> 00:42:30.949
I was thinking about it.

00:42:30.949 --> 00:42:48.628
There's not that much you could do about the smoke besides limiting the size of the fire, because there's no way you can process this amount of smoke that would come, and essentially all the smoke control techniques that we have are based on taking smoke from inside the building to outside of the building without really changing the smoke.

00:42:48.628 --> 00:42:58.039
So I don't think you could act on the smoke that much, Even though there are some ability to use water curtains to wash out ammonia or chloride.

00:42:58.039 --> 00:43:02.432
But I'm not sure if this would be useful in this case.

00:43:02.432 --> 00:43:06.027
Water, runoff water that I think is important.

00:43:06.509 --> 00:43:19.891
In your book you also give an example of a lot of damage to water environment around one of the waste fires, where tons of fish were dead in the lake nearby because of the wastewater.

00:43:19.891 --> 00:43:32.375
So I assume, being prepared for that, that you may have a lot of water that's contaminated after a fire and we're talking about hundreds of cubic meters of water to be able to collect and then have the ability of water that's contaminated after a fire and we're talking about hundreds of cubic meters of water to be able to collect and then have the ability to process that.

00:43:32.375 --> 00:43:34.373
That sounds a reasonable strategy.

00:43:34.885 --> 00:43:39.036
And also being aware of where the location where the facility is located.

00:43:39.036 --> 00:43:41.572
Are you inland or are you at the coast?

00:43:41.572 --> 00:43:44.494
Is it freshwater or is it saltwater nearby?

00:43:44.494 --> 00:43:56.954
So because the short-term and the long-term effect on the water environment and for the fish and everything is quite different for inland freshwater and for coastal saltwater.

00:43:56.954 --> 00:44:13.197
So if your facility is just at the coast and the ocean is the closest neighbor, the situation is quite different than when we're in an inland and in like fragile ecological surroundings and after the fire, when we have to clean up.

00:44:13.679 --> 00:44:32.614
I actually think that that there could be a role for fire safety engineers in this space, and that that's actually my chapter in the in the in the handbook, where we discuss different approaches to model the consequences of large fires in the environment, like figure out how far the smoke went and where it could have accumulated.

00:44:32.614 --> 00:44:42.438
Did you, after those big fires, have you observed any specific actions, how, how to choose which part has to be cleaned like?

00:44:42.438 --> 00:44:50.405
Was there any sampling analysis on site to identify the range of environmental damage outside of the fires?

00:44:51.025 --> 00:45:00.275
I would say in general there's very limited efforts to really go in depth and evaluate the consequences of individual fires.

00:45:00.275 --> 00:45:15.213
So I think in general we need more fire evaluations that don't just look at ignition causes or if somebody did something criminal, but also to try to learn from the fires, also to a bigger extent.

00:45:15.213 --> 00:45:21.771
And usually the reason why you don't do a big, extensive evaluation is that it costs money.

00:45:22.313 --> 00:45:38.217
So yeah there is a need to have funding also for these evaluations and learnings, and sometimes the insurance companies have a specific interest in knowing, and then sometimes the environmental authorities have some specific interest if there are big incidents.

00:45:38.217 --> 00:45:48.679
But for the absolute majority of fires there is no evaluation of anything other a bit short about what happened.

00:45:49.485 --> 00:46:12.827
You know, and perhaps this is the most painful point to me, because at least in the Polish context, about those 700 fires that I told you about, the mechanism that was repetitively visible was that someone would start a company that would specialize in utilizing high dangerous waste, which is a very expensive service.

00:46:12.827 --> 00:46:21.771
They would give their services abroad of Poland, in Poland, but also abroad, like Germany and the surrounding countries.

00:46:21.771 --> 00:46:26.648
So they would collect high hazard waste under the premise that it's going to be utilized.

00:46:26.648 --> 00:46:33.679
They would just have thousands and thousands of plastic storage tanks filling up a land plot.

00:46:33.679 --> 00:46:47.699
When they realized that they cannot store anymore, they would just bankrupt and go away and disappear and suddenly the local community is left with thousands of storage tanks with high-hazardous waste.

00:46:47.699 --> 00:47:08.398
Community is left with thousands of storage tanks with high hazardous waste, the ones that in your scale are orange because you take care in in placing them in the correct place, but in ours they would be like bright red, almost white red, and eventually a fire would happen in that facility and you know the products of that fire would contaminate everything around and would pose a huge hazard to the community.

00:47:08.925 --> 00:47:14.471
And in this criminal case, very criminal case, you don't have anyone to pay for this.

00:47:14.471 --> 00:47:19.972
There's no insurer that would insure the landfill who could take responsibility for mitigating that.

00:47:19.972 --> 00:47:26.753
It's all in society and I find this absolutely horrible and in many cases, many fires.

00:47:26.753 --> 00:47:36.099
I believe there is this unequal burden on the society versus the person who has profited from the activity.

00:47:36.099 --> 00:47:37.925
You know on who pays on doing that?

00:47:37.925 --> 00:48:02.961
Because I believe we could use really good tools for fire safety engineering to really indicate, like which parts of a village or a town require a follow-up assessment of the pollution which requires specific type of cleaning, perhaps which people are under elevated risk of some diseases related to their acute exposure, and just send them to screening tests.

00:48:02.961 --> 00:48:03.503
We could do that.

00:48:03.503 --> 00:48:04.831
We have the knowledge.

00:48:04.831 --> 00:48:07.653
We have the knowledge, tools, abilities to do that.

00:48:07.653 --> 00:48:12.492
It's just we don't have the person to pay for that and, as you said, it's expensive services.

00:48:13.045 --> 00:48:20.338
I hope one day it becomes a service that fire safety engineers could serve on a good basis.

00:48:20.724 --> 00:48:44.748
And perhaps I mean obviously governments need to step in, because if there's no one to pay, it's not that we can forget about the problem there is a massive challenge in the industry, at least in norway, is that because of the risks involved with these types of waste and these facilities, there are fewer and fewer and fewer options for having your facility insured.

00:48:44.748 --> 00:48:54.375
So some of these types of facilities and some are handling certain types of waste fractions they have big problems in getting any insurance.

00:48:54.375 --> 00:49:20.768
And then when you have increasing demands to consider environmental aspects from the environmental authorities but it doesn't come with any cash, then I mean having insurance for your facility is becoming increasingly difficult perhaps they will start a mutual fund to insure and will repeat the history of 150 years ago when industry did exactly that, when they couldn't insure their meals.

00:49:21.188 --> 00:49:23.893
you know, that's how factory metal was born.

00:49:23.893 --> 00:49:42.744
I guess we can end on that, and that's another aspect of how fire safety engineering can grow in this space, because if you cannot insure the space, perhaps you need to invest more in engineering a safe facility that will be insurable, and if that's the case, a lot of our listeners will have good, well-paid jobs and will serve the society doing what they love.

00:49:42.744 --> 00:49:46.190
Ragni, it was a pleasure to have you in the show.

00:49:46.190 --> 00:49:50.338
It was truly a beautiful day to talk about garbage and thank you for that.

00:49:50.739 --> 00:49:51.099
Thank you.

00:49:52.045 --> 00:49:52.407
And that's it.

00:49:52.407 --> 00:49:53.088
Thank you for listening.

00:49:53.088 --> 00:49:56.396
It was a trash talk, but I hope you've enjoyed it, pun intended.

00:49:56.396 --> 00:50:15.726
The subject discussed today is something immediately important for anyone dealing with waste sorting, waste handling facilities, but I think the solutions or ideas presented here are also applicable to a wide sort of engineering that we would normally do in industrial facilities of all kinds.

00:50:15.726 --> 00:50:29.295
So I think it's just an example of good fire safety engineering holistic thinking, looking into your problem, perhaps even a framework on how you can approach difficult, non-typical fire safety engineering cases.

00:50:29.295 --> 00:50:30.728
I truly think this is the case.

00:50:31.309 --> 00:50:33.255
So for today's episode, that would be it.

00:50:33.255 --> 00:50:46.427
Dragny has sent me some papers and links that you can find in the show notes, and if you would like to extend your knowledge about these types of fires and facilities, feel welcome to dig into the show notes and you'll find them there.

00:50:46.427 --> 00:50:53.456
And if you just enjoy fire science, I'll have good news for you Every Wednesday there's a new episode of the fire science show.

00:50:53.456 --> 00:50:59.907
So let's meet up here next Wednesday for another interesting take on fire science and fire safety engineering.

00:50:59.907 --> 00:51:00.407
See you there.

00:51:00.407 --> 00:51:25.844
Bye, thank you.

168 - Fires in Waste Industry with Ragni Fjellgaard Mikalsen

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